Getting on a plane, I told
the ticket lady, “ Send one
of my bags to New York, send one to Los Angeles, and
send one to Miami. ”
She said, “ We can ’ t do
that! ” I told her, “ You did
it last week! ”
— Comedian Henny Youngman
While passengers grimace at the idea of airplane food, and tremble at the idea of turbulence, when it comes to the treatment of airline luggage, people tend to follow the old adage “If I didn’t laugh, I’d cry.” Of course disappearing luggage is no joke when it happens to you, and recently the number of complaints filed about baggage being lost or damaged has even surpassed that of complaints about delays. So what actually happens to your bags when you hand them off at the ticket counter or curbside check-in?
Moving Bags
Once you entrust your precious cargo to an airline representative, he or she attaches to it a
tag that contains a ten-digit code plus a bunch of information about you and your travel
routing: airlines, flight numbers, transfer cities, destination, and so on. This usually appears in both human-readable text and computer-readable bar codes. If your bag or box is particularly heavy, the airline may charge you an overweight baggage fee (because the heavier the
airplane, the more fuel it burns). Then the bag is placed on a conveyor belt, and it disappears from your sight.
The airlines are facing strike threats from a number of key unions, including the Brotherhood of Luggage Misplacers, the Airline Seat Shrinkers
Guild, and the
International Association of Workers Who Make Sure
That No Coach Passenger ’ s
In-flight Snack Packet Contains More Than Four Pretzels.
— Columnist Dave Barry The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are
composed entirely of lost airline luggage.
— Satirist Mark Russell
Your luggage now enters a race to get to the right airplane at the right time. In most airports around the world, airline employees read each tag individually, heft bags from the primary conveyor belt onto the appropriate cart, drive the cart to the appropriate airplane, and then load the bags onto a conveyor belt leading into the aircraft’s cargo hold where other
employees place the bags securely. In large wide-body aircraft, baggage handlers first load the cargo into one of several enclosed, metal cargo palettes that are then rolled into the belly of the airplane and locked down for the flight.
However, some airports are so large and handle so much baggage that it’s impractical to rely on humans to haul everything from place to place. For example, the San Francisco
International Airport alone handles more than 60,000 bags each day. Large airports like this
one have computerized luggage-moving systems that rely on a complex series of conveyor belts and chutes.
In this kind of system, your bag’s tag is first scanned by a set of laser-beam bar code readers surrounding the primary conveyor belt, similar to the ones at supermarkets. About 10 percent of the time, the tag is folded or otherwise unreadable, and a high-speed mechanical pusher arm immediately shoves the bag to another conveyor to get scanned by hand. Either way, from this moment, the bag is constantly tracked from place to place by hundreds of networked computers, which are also aware of your itinerary and the schedules of every airplane at the airport.
It’s not surprising that bags get scratched and scuffed. As they trundle along, they encounter a series of large metal pushers, each of which can shove as many as eighty bags per minute from one conveyor belt to another at just the right moment. Finally, a robotic arm pushes your bag down a chute, where someone loads it onto a truck destined for your flight. If the
system’s timing is off, your bag ends up on the wrong truck, and then the wrong airplane.
Everyone knows you shouldn’t bring explosives or hazardous chemicals on board an aircraft.
But did you know mercury is prohibited? Mercury causes aluminum (which many airplanes are made of) to corrode, almost like dry rot in wood. If you drop mercury on the floor of an
airplane, it will spread around and a large portion of the fuselage may have to be scrapped.
Mercury in a barometer or a personal thermometer is usually allowed if it is entirely enclosed in a protective case.
Some huge airports, like Denver International, have done away with the handloading of trucks altogether, and each bag drops from a chute into a moving destination-coded vehicle (DCV)—
a small rail cart that travels along miles of twisting underground tracks at almost 20 mph (32 km/hr). The DCV never stops rolling along its mazelike tracks; it simply tips its open-topped bin over at precisely the right moment to receive a bag (one bag per DCV), tips it back up while in transit, and then tips again at the correct moment to drop the bag out at its
destination.
Successful luggage-handling systems move your bags at almost exactly the same speed that you move through the airport, so bags don’t arrive too late to make your flight or too early—
perhaps making a connecting flight that you don’t.
Being Careful
Along the way to the airplane, your bags are also scanned for contraband such as drugs and explosives. While some airports outside the United States still only X-ray bags, American airports are now employing trained “sniffer” dogs, X-rays, and devices based on computed tomography (CT) scanners, like those in hospitals. Each minute, these devices build “slice”
images of about nine pieces of luggage and then automatically compare them to the CT properties of known explosives. The devices can fog your photographic film (even inside lead bags), so most professional photographers carry their film in clear plastic bags and ask that they get hand-checked at the security gate. (The X-ray machines at the passenger security checkpoints are much less powerful, and typically only fog film after many passes.)
Someday airlines will offer time travel. You can go to the future year 2090 to visit your progeny, but your luggage will wind up in the Middle Ages.
— Frank Romano, technology columnist
While 99.5 percent of bags arrive on the same aircraft as their owners, in 2001, there were 2.2 million reports of mishandled (lost or damaged) luggage in the United States, for an average of 4.55 pieces of luggage per 1,000 passengers. Some airlines tend to track people’s bags better than others—Alaska Airlines, for instance, averages less than half the national rate. The good news is that 80 percent of lost bags are retrieved successfully within a day, and 99 percent arrive at their proper destination within five days.
However, if the machine does find anything suspicious, the bag gets automatically transferred to another location for a more detailed search, usually done by hand with you watching.
Also, ever since terrorist bombings in the 1980s, airlines are hesitant to allow a passenger’s bag to fly without the passenger on board, too. If someone checks in a bag but never boards the aircraft, the airline may pull that bag off before takeoff. Some airlines are taking this process further, giving the baggage handlers handheld bar code scanners that can wirelessly communicate with the central computer to compare each bag with each passenger’s boarding status.
Lost Luggage
With all that computerized technology, how could anything go worng? Obviously, in the real world the system is never perfect; tags are misread, bags are routed to the wrong airplanes, and some luggage is simply lost in the shuffle. It’s not uncommon for a cart driver to take a corner too quickly and have one or two bags fall off onto the tarmac. In an automated system, an odd-sized bag may fall off a conveyor belt and have to be later retrieved by hand.
Because most luggage mishandling occurs when bags are transferred from one airplane to
another, the best way to avoid losing your bags is to fly nonstop. Of course, that’s rarely practical these days, so here are a few more tips:
● Make your luggage really stand out. Paint fluorescent colors on the side or tie on colored bands. (Use a color other than red, which is overused.) Or perhaps just buy brightly colored bags; they’re not fashionable, but they’re hard to miss.
● Always remove extraneous tags before checking your bag; they might confuse the bar code readers.
● Check in an hour or more before your flight, and make sure you have at least an hour layover between flights when connecting, especially when transferring from one airline to another.
● Hold on to your claim checks (they’re usually stapled to your boarding pass) until you have your bags back. You will need them if anything goes wrong.
● Personalize your luggage. You’d be surprised at how many people take home a bag that turns out to be someone else’s. Be sure that your name and address are on a tag or label on the outside of the bag, preferably where it cannot be torn off accidentally. Also, put more identifying information (perhaps even your itinerary) inside each bag.
● When you check in your bag, make sure to confirm your final destination with the airline representative. Is it San Jose, California (airport code: SJC), or San José, Costa Rica (airport code: SJO)? If you’re transferring from one airline to another, or making a connection in a different country from your origin, your bags may only be checked to the intermediate point.
● Don’t lock your bags or put valuables in them. Security personnel sometimes need to search through checked baggage. Consider packing objects you don’t want touched in clear plastic bags. Also avoid packing food or drinks in your bags, as organic items may be flagged as suspicious.
Finally, don’t put anything irreplaceable in your checked bags. Only about .005 percent of bags are permanently lost, but that’s still enough that you should be wary. Airlines in the United States don’t have to pay you more than about $1,250 if they lose your bag on a domestic flight. (You may have to prove the value of the contents.)
International conventions, however, state that airlines only have to pay $9.07 per pound (or
$20/kg) for bags lost on international flights—that’s about $180 for a twenty-pound bag! The courts have upheld this limit, even in a case where an airline lost a professional courier’s bag containing $2 million in cash. Fortunately, you can often buy “excess valuation” insurance when you check in (but even this wouldn’t have covered the unfortunate courier’s loss).
Carry-on Baggage
Since you shouldn’t put your valuables in checked baggage, you’ll need to carry them on board with you. Here, too, the airlines have detailed restrictions, such as the maximum size and weight of your carry-on bags. Note that different airlines and different countries have different restrictions; for instance, you may be allowed to bring a bag aboard on the long flight to Australia and later have to check it in on domestic flights within the continent.
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration provides a list of items you shouldn’t carry on board with you (see www.theflyingbook.com for a link to the FAA Web site), including: pepper spray, drain cleaners, bleach, house paint, solvents, hairspray (containers bigger than sixteen
ounces), strike-anywhere matches (a small number of regular matches are okay), or sharp objects like knives, scissors, corkscrews, and disposable razor blades. Most likely, the items will just be confiscated, but you can actually be slapped with a hefty fine for each violation if you’re found to be willfully breaking the law.
Checking your bags with the Sky Caps at the curbside is often faster and more convenient than standing in line at the airline check-in counter, as long as you don’t have to make any changes to your prepurchased ticket. Some Sky Caps are employed by a specific airline, whereas others work for a collective of airlines at the airport. The Sky Caps’ name probably originated from the “Red Caps,” the porters employed by the railroads.
You have probably heard that airport police officers often rely on “sniffer” dogs to find illegal drugs or explosive chemicals. Lesser known are the dogs trained to find large amounts of currency passing undeclared from one country to another.
It seems obvious, but you can’t carry firearms or ammunition on board. (Every now and again people will honestly forget that they have a gun in their bag; don’t be one of them.) You can pack an unloaded firearm in your checked baggage, but you must declare it when you check in.
One of the most frequently asked questions at security checkpoints is whether the X-ray machine will damage data on disks and laptops. X-rays don’t hurt digital media at all, but magnetic fields do. Fortunately, the X-ray machines in most Western airports are well shielded from stray magnetic fields created by their motors, so you don’t have to worry. In eastern Europe and developing nations, it may be worth ensuring that these items are checked by hand instead. By the way, the metal-detection devices (magnetometers) that you walk through do create a magnetic pulse, so take that floppy disk out of your pocket.
One more tip: It’s worth keeping your carry-on bags locked or at least difficult to open,
especially on long international flights. Some unscrupulous people make a living stealing from carry-ons while the airplane is dark and most passengers are asleep. It is also not unheard of for people to slip drugs into another passenger’s carry-on bag to better the
chances of getting them through customs (only to be stolen back later).