Baggage Handling

Baggage handling is an essential element of airport operations, but as with other utility functions, it is often remarked on only when it goes wrong. The effects of failure can range from a few passengers not receiving their bags when they arrive at their destination to the wide-spread disruption of airport operations, including flight cancellation, along with all that such events entail for airlines and passengers. 

The scale and complexity of baggage handling have changed over the course of the last few decades, and this has led to a spectrum of baggage-handling solutions that range from the simple to the very sophisticated, based on the needs of the airline customers.

While all commercial airports have check-in, reclaim, and fight build facilities (also called makeup), only hub airports have any significant transfer baggage facilities. Hub airports with multiple terminals also may have a significant inter-terminal transfer process connecting passengers and their bags arriving at one terminal with their departure flights in a different terminal.

Bags entering the system via a bag drop generally will be screened in the terminal of departure. Once in the baggage system, optionally, they may be stored and then delivered to a flight build output. From there they are taken to the departing aircraft and loaded. Terminating bags arriving at a terminal will be delivered to reclaim for collection by passengers. In some circumstances and jurisdictions, terminating bags are screened for illicit items. Transfer bags arriving at a terminal will be into baggage input the system and routed to the terminal of departure. Once the there, process follows that for locally checked-in baggage.

Baggage-Handling-System Configurations 

The design of the passenger terminal complex itself can radically affect the configuration of the outbound-baggage system. A number of design considerations are covered in IATA (2004) Conventional centralized pier finger airports, such as Chicago O'Hare, Schiphol Amsterdam, and Manchester International, operate on one or more central bag rooms in the main terminal area These require elaborate sorting systems, but can be efficient in the use of personnel released when not needed in off-peak who are periods. Decentralized facilities, such as Frankfurt (Germany) and Dallas-Fort Worth, have a number of decentralized bag rooms that are closely associated with a few gates. The sorting requirements of these makeup areas are minimal, but it is more difficult to use staff efficiently in the decentralized situation, where there are substantial variations in workload between peak and off-peak periods. A third concept of baggage makeup area is the remote bag room. In an airport such as Atlanta, where three-quarters of the traffic is transfer, there is considerable cross-apron activity remote bag rooms provide for the complex sorting necessary without trans porting all baggage back to the main terminal. In Terminal 5 at Heathrow, the baggage system actually consists of two elements: (1) a bulk, centralized system for dealing with all but the most time-critical of bags (which brings the benefit of economies of scale for staffing and other resources) and (2) a distributed delivery system to most stands that is used to deliver just the time-critical bags(which brings the benefit of swift delivery right to the aircraft,  giving handlers the best chance of loading last-minute bags). Irrespective of the arrangement of the baggage system, most baggage systems consist of some or all of the following components.

Check-in and Bag Drop 

Traditional check-in and drop desks can be arranged in a number bag of ways 

•Linear 

•Island 

•Flow-through 

Schematics of these three configurations are shown in pictures. Both linear and island check-in have the disadvantage that the flow of passengers leaving the desks can conflict with queues of passengers waiting to reach the desks. Flow-through arrangements, however, avoid this difficulty but are feasible only where the terminal has the space to accommodate vertical movement of bags within the check-in floor plate.

Reclaim 

The most common baggage reclaim device is a carousel, of which there are several variants. The two principal choices are 

•Flatbed or inclined 

•Direct or indirect infeed(s)  

Flatbed carousels are preferred, if space permits, because bags are more easily picked off by passengers. An inclined carousel accommodates more bags per unit length 0.75 bag/foot (25 bags/meter) rather than 0.5 bag/foot (1.5 bags/ meter) for a flatbed but at the expense of bags being piled one upon another. This can make it difficult for passengers to retrieve their bags, particularly if theirs is trapped by a heavy bag that has fallen on top of it. Bags can be loaded directly onto the device, or they can be fed indirectly via one or more conveyor routes. Direct loading has the advantage that with careful placement, a higher linear density of bags can be achieved than is possible with indirect feeds. However, by using indirect feeds, the adjacency between the reclaim carousel and the vehicle docks (where the bags are actually unloaded) can be relaxed. This may be desirable or even necessary to fit with a terminal building design.