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Comment by prpon | Hacker News Reader

I hold an Indian passport and I recently got thrown out of a plane to Spain via Heathrow right before it took off. They said, I didn't have a transit visa. I was changing planes in the same terminal and the total time I was to spend in Heathrow was 2 hours.

I have a Schengen visa. No, that doesn't work for London. I begged and pleaded for hours at the gate. Nothing. The worst part is, I did the same route for years with no problem. Apparently rules changed recently.

Trust me, It really is awful being that person who gets discriminated based on where you are born.

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I feel for you. I am Italian and my wife is Thai. Just to change planes in London on the way to Mexico, she should have applied for a Visa or... "go and hope the immigration officer in London let her trough". This is actually stated, with other words, in the law. Same for the US. We could not buy a KLM ticket to Mexico from Italy because the stopover was in Los Angeles. I still wonder why they made this rule... probably terrorism. Anyway, closed countries inevitably collapse, remember the Soviet Union?

Yeah the whole transit visa thing in the UK is pretty stupid. Especially when you go through terminal 5 at Heathrow. You can get out without passing an immigration officer. So why do you need a visa? Idiots.

That was supposed to be "can't get out [of the terminal] without passing an immigration officer". Sorry. :)

The UK isn't part of Schengen, that's a continental Europe thing rather than covering all EU members:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schengen_Area

Bangkok, Buenos Aires or Sydney are not Schengen neither but they don't require a visa for airport transit. That's just politicians covering their assess in case some terrorist blows up a plane on transit flight.

Yeah... I learned that the hard way, too.

I can't describe how stupid I felt at that moment...

Hi, I am an indian passport holder. I have a spain national visa (issued for students)valid for 5 months and I am going back home to india but my flight is through london heathrow so do I need the airport transit visa too? I have read that I dont require it (http://www.immihelp.com/visas/nonustransit.html) but your case is exactly mine so can you please help me out here

Your best bet would be to go to the nearest airport and talk at the ticketing counter. They have a chart on who is allowed to board and who is not. In my case, my spain visa was category C which apparently requires transit visa. HTH.

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