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  • Lost luggage

    Many of us have to a greater or lesser extent suffered from lost luggage at the destination airport (thankfully, touch wood, I've never lost luggage in 20 years of business and holiday flying). Anxiety normally prevails at the luggage carousel...will I see my luggage appear on the carousel, or not...

    So I've been thinking about the following 2 situations:

    - if a pax has not boarded an aircraft, his/her luggage is removed from the hold. How would the authorities know that the missing pax's luggage is in fact in the hold, before looking for it? Has it ever happened that a missing pax's luggage was NOT found inside the aircraft's hold (i.e. it got lost on its way to the aircraft hold)?

    - if luggage presence in the hold is tracked (which it probably isn't), surely each pax on a flight can be told prior to take-off that his/her luggage has been loaded, or not?

    I guess in reality, luggage is only registered upon check-in, and during its voyage from check-in to being put into the a/c's hold, it can be mislaid or stolen. The pax would only become aware of this when the carousel is switched off at the destination airport, and his/her luggage has not appeared...?

  • #2
    Bags are most certainly tracked. Mostly through the use of 'bingo sheets' which are sheets where staff put a sticker that is on the bag tag (that has the sequence number and booking numbers etc...) or use a tally sheet (also referred to as a bingo sheet) where tally marks are made next to the corresponding sequence number that is found on the bag tag. We only mark or stick the stickers on the sheet once we have the bag in our hand and it has made it to the can or cart.

    For containerized planes we use a bingo sheet for each can, so we know what bags are in which can (tracked by sequence number). Some airlines do it differently (WS) where bags are tracked through their operations system (Sabre for example). And every time a tag runs by a scanner, it is picked up and scanned that the bag was there.

    I haven't had an instance where we did a bag pull and the bag wasn't there.

    There is no way to tell all 140 people on a A320 that their bag is indeed on the plane. It would slow everything down to go "Hi Suzie, thanks for boarding, your bag is on the plane. Hi Dave, thanks for boarding, your bag is on the plane. Hi Wayne, thanks for boarding, your bag is not on the plane yet..." It would cost way too much, and there is no efficient/cheap/practical way of running such a system.
    -Kevin

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