Edit: Thanks for taking the time out to reply. I’m enjoying reading all the different explanations and view points.
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So most bags are loaded in to cans (ULD’s) which are designed to be efficiently loaded into aircraft. The can is built by computers and robots who know where every bag is (fully tracked) heavy bags go at the bottom that sort of thing.
The cans are pre-staged at gate ready to be loaded as part of a slick turn around.
Then – the aircraft parks at the wrong terminal / gate – and now hundreds of bags need to be quickly moved.
Or while you think your travelling with your bag in could be in the hold of another aircraft going to the same destination.
Or someone on who check in and checked in their bags didn’t get on the flight this causes a bum (bag unload message) and now to derisk the unaccompanied bags is unloaded.
But that will require the can be unloaded and the heavy bag at the bottom of the can being found and pulled, often the whole can is late.
Or well the check in desks have rigid inputs so you can’t check bags to destinations which are not operating. But suppose your flight is late or there is an operating issue then the admins turn up, they can check in any bag to any destination and if they make a typo the tickets are produced which are invalid.
Then there is the bag which falls off the conveyor, the twits who wrap their bags in cling film.
The twits who try and put balling balls which are rapped in bubble wrap, and l manor of out of gauge items which slow down the process.
Lots go right and that’s what’s expected but the sort computers can go wrong, IDs can be overwritten, messages can be lost, it’s not a perfect system.
Didn’t I read that a fair few US airports use prison labour for baggage handling?
I bet FedEx, UPS, or some other parcel delivery service has lost something on you in the last year. And they don’t even have passengers to worry about moving, the only transport boxes. And they still screw it up. No matter how computerized they make it, it still has a human component, and as long as a human is involved, there is space for accidents.
Low pay and toxic culture for the baggage handlers. The airlines went to a spoke and wheel system several decades ago where you fly from a small local airport to a major airport, where a large jet flies a lot of people to another small airport near your destination.
This means that many long-distance flights have two connecting flights where the baggage from each stop-over has to be sorted and the bags separated for those flyers who were headed to one of several possible legs in the map-wheel.
Bosses yell to the baggage handlers to hurry up, and scream that the plane HAS to pull away from the gate at exactly [*insert time here] OR YOU’RE FIRED!
They do their best, but as long as they don’t mess up too many bag destinations, they get to keep their job.
One of my neighbors is a baggage handler. If you ever met him you’d be asking how they’re able to get any luggage to its destination at all.
After the barcoding and laser reading and conveyor belt journeys your bag has to be humanly picked up and tossed into the correct wagon on the tarmac. Then your bag gets driven over to a plane and tossed onto another conveyor belt that sends it up into the luggage area of the jet. The big question IS… is this jet the same jet that you are going to fly in?????
I am an electrician. I was doing some work on the cameras at Harry Reid (formerly McCarran) airport in Las Vegas recently, and while crawling through the ceiling, I found a bag that had been traveling down the conveyer belt and it’s wheel had caught on a ceiling support wire which caused the bag to jump off the belt and stay in the ceiling for a few months. No one would have ever known about it if I hadn’t found it there. I flipped it back onto the belt and went about my day. If it doesn’t get to its owner, it’ll get auctioned eventually.
There’s two factors in this.
The first is that a lot of companies are involved in luggage. The airline doesn’t put your luggage on the plane or take it off. That’s an airport service. And sometimes the people who do the luggage are their own company contracted by the airport (like Swissport). The more companies that get involved (different company taking off than landing) the more the chain of custody increases. If you have four stop overs that’s at least six different companies involved in your luggage. So let’s say you take a flight from Washington DC to New York City to Luxembourg. You check in your luggage with your airline. It goes to the airline’s people who put it on your plane. When you land in New York the New York airline people take it off and then transfer it to your next flight. Its now back to the responsibility of your airline until it lands in Luxembourg at which point it comes off the plane to you. In 99% of lost luggage cases it’s not the airline that loses it, it’s the airports. They either put it on the wrong flight or they can’t transfer it fast enough.
The other factor is that airlines are still a people orientated system. A person could scan in 10 pieces of luggage bound for Italy and then get to your Luxembourg luggage and just toss it in with Italy. Almost no amount of technology gets rid of operator error.
When it comes to luggage, something I still think was incredible to see was the line outside the cruise ship at the port, and how much luggage there was that all had to be on the ship in the next few hours. 5000 passengers show up 2-6 hours before the ship leaves, drop their bags off, and all the items get on the ship before 4pm, and all of them (for the most part) get dropped off outside your room around dinner time that evening.
There were a lot of impressive logistical feats I witnessed on my first cruise!
Airlines are just freight companies. How many times has an Amazon package been delayed? Same concept applies.
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