When, the Moscow Sheremetyevo Airport said that problems with baggage sorting, which spoiled vacations, business trips, and simply the mood of thousands of passengers in the first half of June, have been resolved. The editors of Around the World heartily congratulate everyone who passed luggage collapse in the largest air harbor of the capital, and talks about why air passenger bags are usually lost and how this can be avoided.
SITA, an international IT company that provides telecommunications and information services to 90% of the airline industry worldwide, in its annual report claims that in 2018, 4.36 billion passengers registered 4.27 billion pieces of baggage, of which 24.8 million pieces were separated from their owners temporarily or permanently after the flight. Although the amount of lost / delayed luggage has halved over the past 10 years, it’s still very much, and it’s not reassuring if your favorite bright green suitcase with funny stickers on the lid turned out to be one of about 25 million units indicated in the report. Why, despite the unprecedented development of artificial intelligence technologies, miniaturization, robotics and other wonders of science, does this happen? There are several reasons. But first, let’s figure out what happens to your things after they rolled on the conveyor belt from the front desk to the unknown.
How is baggage handled at airports
The baggage management system at the airport learns about the existence of your suitcase or any other, including oversized, that is, manually processed by airport employees, when a unique code is displayed on the baggage tag. This happens at the front desk. Further, the baggage placed on the tape leaves along it to the nearest scanner, which reads the barcode on the tag or receives information from the built-in RFID tag. Based on the reading results, the system directs the suitcase along a specific route inside the airport. Namely, to the right exit, into the hands of porters who load things from the conveyor belt into luggage carts and then onto the plane.
Although technology does not stand still, nothing was better than dogs for checking luggage without opening it. Dog nose is the best scanner for narcotic and explosive substances: 2,3-dimethyl 2,3-dinitrobutane – an odor marker added to explosives – dogs feel at concentrations of about 500 trillion shares. Moreover, unlike a mechanical detector, a dog’s nose works with a whole range of odors: it is not only ammonite, TNT, RDX, but also the smell of gunpowder, gun grease and even adrenaline
However, not all baggage successfully overcomes the meeting with the tag scanner – if reading and redirection failed, the suitcase is sent to a special station where people handle it manually (oversized baggage that does not fit on the tape is also processed manually). On the way, luggage is scanned for prohibited and dangerous contents, including using live scanners – dogs. Upon landing, the baggage is loaded back onto carts, then onto conveyors and then onto another plane if you are flying with a transfer, or onto the pickup belt.
Depending on how the baggage management system is structured at a specific airport, operations can be either mostly automated and require human intervention only if something does not work, or they can be carried out with the help of loaders in more or less cases.
So, having arrived at the final point of your route, you did not find your luggage either on the tape or in the oversized cargo dispatch zone. What could have happened?
Baggage Late for Flight
Even if you were on time everywhere before departure, this does not mean that the checked baggage will keep pace with you. Moreover, this applies to both departures from the first point of the route, and transfers from one flight to another somewhere at the transfer airport. Automated baggage distribution systems, although they work much more efficiently than people, still have their own restrictions on the speed of processing and delivery of a suitcase from point A to point B inside the airport. So if the airport is large in terms of both size and passenger flow, and the owner of the suitcase, trombone in a wardrobe trunk or, say, a surfboard is at the baggage drop-off counter just at the check-in closure, or if his flight arrives shortly before the next departure (due to lateness or scheduled), then the chances of problems are greatly increased. But don’t despair: your luggage is most likely
According to the same SITA, just about half of the delays and baggage losses happen at transfers
There are problems with baggage labeling.
For example, the scanner could not read the barcode on the luggage tag due to damage. Or the passenger left a luggage tag or a sticker from a previous flight on his suitcase, and the baggage handling and distribution system sensor or its operator considered outdated information. As a result, the luggage went completely to the wrong place (for example, to the wrong processing line, to the wrong plane), was caught there, excluded from standard processing and irreparably behind the owner.
The baggage tag shall contain the unique number of the baggage unit, name of owner, date of flight, final and intermediate points of the route and other information. For example, an indication of the priority handling of a suitcase in case the owner travels first or business class or flies with a short transfer
Wrong man
At some point, the loader did something wrong: he missed your suitcase, decided to remove it from the belt, to get some content (unfortunately, this happens) or for some reason did not go to work. You say that these are not mistakes? We will not agree: to create a situation in which an airport employee can rob passengers, or reduce the salaries of loaders at the start of the holiday season, is also a human error, though, it’s more about airport management. Passengers are also prone to make mistakes: it seems to you that no one else has such a bright green suitcase, and the owner of the other, who did not check the luggage tag, only at home will find that the funny stickers on the lid are not his.
People are an indispensable (for now) part of the baggage management system at airports. And they are the weakest link, prone to make mistakes or just toss the suitcase on a grand scale. The latter, however, has an explanation: so the loader can reload more pieces of luggage in less time (he has standards for this) and at the same time he is less tired
Everything is broken!
Moreover, this may concern both mechanisms and software, and procedures requiring the work of living people. It may well happen that a tested and well-tuned baggage management system that has successfully survived tens of thousands of hours of testing fails, management, operators and movers make mistakes and all of which lead to disastrous consequences. Baggage collapse, which occurred in the first week of Terminal 5 of London Heathrow Airport in 2008, is still considered one of the largest and most famous cases of this kind. The collapse then affected 75 thousand passengers. The development of events and the reasons for this require a separate story. We simply notice here that even when using complex and very high-quality systems, an unfortunate combination of circumstances and breakdowns are possible. We hope this does not happen to you.
This video about the baggage management system at Terminal 5 of Heathrow Airport was released by Vanderlande Industries, a system development company, five years after the collapse
| Who is guiltyOfficially, from the moment you checked in your baggage until you received it, the carrier will take responsibility for it. But operations with him are not carried out by her, but by the corresponding airport services. So you have the right to curse the carrier who lost your favorite bright green suitcase in the midst of the heat of summer, but only because it is impossible to get through to his baggage tracing service, that he does not want to pay the due compensation for the loss or takes your belongings too long, if they are still found. But the airport is directly responsible for the delay or loss. Unless, of course, you did everything right. |
How to minimize the likelihood of problems
For this, airports and airlines should rather implement the most modern methods of baggage handling (for example, using RFID tags that eliminate the need for visual scanning of baggage tags, speeding up processes and reducing the likelihood of errors), carefully plan the procedures and procedures and monitor their implementation, as well as timely upgrade systems.
But we, that is, ordinary passengers, are left with the following:
– Do not come back to back to the airport. So that if problems arise at any of the stages of processing your luggage, they would be able to be solved. If you buy a ticket with a change and plan to drop off your belongings, try not to take the option of waiting too short between flights (less than one and a half to two hours), even if the airline offers these – leave this option to those who fly light.
– Do not leave luggage tags or any stickers from the last flight on the suitcase . A suitcase is not a fuselage of a fighter; it doesn’t need to serve as a monument to your travels at all, but both the system and the person can scan the wrong barcode.
When driving from home, the suitcase should indicate the address of the place where you plan to stay. But they do not recommend indicating the home address on the way home for fear that this might attract robber-house-robbers – it is better to enter a worker instead. If you have a business card, put a couple of cards in a suitcase – this will also help the tracing service to identify the “loss”
– Mark your suitcase. First of all, attach your own tag to it with the name, surname, phone and the address of the place where you are following. Also, some bright accessory may turn out to be useful. This will help airport employees find your luggage if they lag behind you while traveling, and also make it clear even to an inattentive traveler that right now he is trying to remove someone else’s suitcase from the tape, and not his own, albeit similar. When contacting the baggage tracing service, a photograph of a suitcase taken immediately before your parting with it can also help. Remember or write down the length, width and height of the suitcase and the make of the manufacturer. Finally, be prepared to tell the service what was inside.
Photo: Getty Images
