Skip to main content

Transit visas at London Heathrow

There is a certain amount of confusion about the conditions under which a transit visa is required when changing planes at Heathrow. There is an official list of conditions here. It seems clear that if you are on the list but you have a visa that allows you entry into the US then you can go in either direction via Heathrow without needing a transit visa provided you don't change airports. It becomes murky when you have a status change when in the US. I flew a week ago via Heathrow and did not need a transit visa.

The following facts may all be relevant or useful to other people:
  1. I had an unexpired (but invalid) F-1 visa in my passport.
  2. I no longer have a valid I-20
  3. I changed status from F-1 to H-1B while within the US
  4. I did not have a H-1B stamp in my passport
  5. My stopover time was 2 hours (as a side note, I would not recommend a shorter transit time because you have to go through security again)
  6. My connecting flight was from the same terminal and the same airline
  7. The only person who checked my passport for visas was the BA desk clerk at Logan
  8. At Heathrow the passport is only used to verify identity
  9. No one asked for an I-20 (I recall vaguely someone asked for an I-20 at Heathrow last time I came to the US via London, but I don't recall if they actually looked at it or merely reminded me that I would need it in the US)
  10. I did NOT need a transit visa
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A note on Python's __exit__() and errors

Python's context managers are a very neat way of handling code that needs a teardown once you are done. Python objects have do have a destructor method ( __del__ ) called right before the last instance of the object is about to be destroyed. You can do a teardown there. However there is a lot of fine print to the __del__ method. A cleaner way of doing tear-downs is through Python's context manager , manifested as the with keyword. class CrushMe: def __init__(self): self.f = open('test.txt', 'w') def foo(self, a, b): self.f.write(str(a - b)) def __enter__(self): return self def __exit__(self, exc_type, exc_val, exc_tb): self.f.close() return True with CrushMe() as c: c.foo(2, 3) One thing that is important, and that got me just now, is error handling. I made the mistake of ignoring all those 'junk' arguments ( exc_type, exc_val, exc_tb ). I just skimmed the docs and what popped out is that you need to return True or
Post a Comment
Read more

Using adminer on Mac OS X

adminer is a nice php based sqlite manager. I prefer the firefox plugin "sqlite manager" but it currently has a strange issue with FF5 that basically makes it unworkable, so I was looking for an alternative to tide me over. I really don't want apache running all the time on my computer and don't want people browsing to my computer, so what I needed to do was: Download the adminer php script into /Library/WebServer/Documents/ Change /etc/apache2/httpd.conf to allow running of php scripts (uncomment the line that begins: LoadModule php5_module Start the apache server: sudo apachectl -k start Operate the script by going to localhost Stop the server: sudo apachectl -k stop  
Post a Comment
Read more