The forty minutes before you land

Airport car parks are among the few pieces of infrastructure in this country designed entirely around a stranger making a good decision quickly, which is why so many people make a bad one. The signage tells you where the spaces are and nothing about where you will be walking to afterwards. A chauffeur working a terminal weekly builds a private map of it: the level that puts you closest to the lift, the row that avoids the ramp, and the bay that does not sit behind a pay machine at seven in the morning.

Every terminal has a short-stay car park and every short-stay car park has a level that puts you closest to arrivals. Learning which one is worth more than any amount of general airport knowledge. At Heathrow the walk from a badly chosen bay to the meeting point can add six or seven minutes each way, and you will spend both of those minutes walking beside a client carrying their own bag.

The other half of the decision is the exit. A bay near a lift is not much use if the lift queue at that hour is four cars deep. Chauffeurs who work a terminal regularly park for the way out as much as the way in.

Ask anybody who has waited in an arrivals hall what the longest part of a flight is and they will say the flight. Ask a chauffeur and the answer is the twenty minutes nobody has a name for, between the aircraft door opening and the passenger walking out of customs. It is the only stretch of a journey with no schedule attached to it at all, no announcement and no display, and it varies more than the flight itself ever does. Everything about how an arrival is planned follows from accepting that.

Landed is not arrived. The gap between wheels down and the first bag on the carousel is the least predictable part of the whole journey, and it is entirely outside anyone’s control. A wide-body arriving at a remote stand at seven in the morning can put forty minutes between the landing time on the board and the moment a passenger walks through customs.

That is why the useful message to send is not we are here. It is the meeting point, plainly described, sent while you are still taxiing, so that the first thing you read when the phone reconnects is where to walk.

• Landing time is a starting gun, not a finish line.
• Remote stands and passport queues add more time than traffic does.
• One message with a location beats three asking where you are.