Edit: Thanks for taking the time out to reply. I’m enjoying reading all the different explanations and view points.
In: Other
There is a lot of luggage.
Even though there are many great pieces of technology, things can go wrong. Tags can get stuck in belts or adjacent pieces of luggage and ripped off. People can take a bag from the wrong cart and put it on a plane it;s not supposed to go on.
The really bad situations occur when there is an overload of bags, and they are taken off the belts and just stacked someplace (yes, I’m talking about you [Schiphol](https://nltimes.nl/2023/07/04/thousands-bags-still-stuck-schiphol-malfunction-six-days-ago).)
You mean how do those flimsy little barcode stickers come off sometimes? Can’t imagine.
considering the absolute mind boggling amount of luggage they handle every single day, it is rare
853 million passengers per year
Even with 5 9s (99.999%) effectiveness you would lose 8500 suitcases per year
Tags come off luggage… Suitcases fall off carts or conveyor belts… Thrown on the wrong cart… tsa flags it for random screening and it misses its flight due to handoff between TSA and airline.
Let’s say the airline lost a bag, and they knew they lost a bag. They’re not going to delay service until they find a bag, there is no financial or other incentive for them to do that. So they leave the bag and it gets more and more lost as time goes by…
Because it’s cheaper to just compensate people for their lost luggage than to build a system with no holes. Most luggage isn’t worth that much.
Computers help do the work, but they don’t do the work. There are still a constantly changing number of variables that go on between the computer terminal/scanner and the luggage getting on the right plane.
In the 1990s the baggage handling system at the Denver airport was a famous example of a huge software and hardware automation project that ended up way more riddled with problems than anyone predicted. The short version of why this can happen is that in order for a bag to get from the bag check to a plane or from a plane to baggage claim, hundreds or thousands of little decisions about whose bag it is, what flight they’re on, how to route the bag on the belts, how much force is required to divert the bag to a different belt, etc, all have to go right. It only takes one problem for things to go wrong.
It seems like one integrated system, but a baggage handling decision is actually a lot of smaller systems working together. At any point a human or a computer can make a mistake, and sometimes that results in lost is misrouted baggage.
Disgruntled employees obviously wouldn’t deliberately throw your bag onto the wrong flight.
I missed my connecting flight and managed to get booked on like 5 different alternatives while it was getting sorted out. My bag got put on the wrong plane. Of course it wasn’t lost and they flew it to the correct airport the next day. But still. Stuff like that happens.
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