It has long since ceased to be a matter of course when traveling by air that not only the passengers but also their luggage is transported. The memories of last summer’s suitcase chaos at many European airports, including central hubs such as London Heathrow and Amsterdam Schiphol, but also manageable airports such as Düsseldorf or Hamburg, are still bad memories.
And the next summer holidays are sure to come. The Christmas season, when many people also traveled by plane, provided a foretaste: shortly before the turn of the year, around 30,000 suitcases had accumulated at Munich Airport. Some weren’t even loaded, others flew in from all over the world, albeit several days after their owners. Then they lay there.
Due to a lack of staff, particularly stubborn passengers were admitted to the security area after days of frustrating waiting and fruitless phone calls afterwards, where they dug out their luggage themselves from the mass of suitcases and travel bags. Apparently it was the only effective measure.
But who does that help if you live more than half a day’s journey from the airport where the culinary souvenirs in your luggage are slowly rotting away? Or, even worse: Who stands in Thailand without a change of clothes and has to buy swimming trunks in a winter sweater so that he can go to the beach.
Before you allow former passengers without a boarding pass into the security area to have them search for their suitcases, it would be worth considering whether passengers should load and unload their luggage themselves in the future. Firstly, there would probably be more holdalls in the same machine as their owners. And all bargaining counter actions could be moved to the apron, which would reduce the crowding inside the airport building.
But if you think you’re on the safe side once your suitcase is stowed in the luggage compartment, you’re wrong. Recently, the cargo hatch of a machine that had already reached its cruising altitude opened in eastern Siberia. The pilot turned back and was able to land safely. But the luggage compartment had emptied noticeably after this mishap. How good that the region where it rained suitcases is so sparsely populated. It is not yet known that one of the pieces of luggage would have been found and would have had such devastating consequences as a Coke bottle thrown out of an airplane in the film “The Gods Must Be Crazy”.
On the other hand, you can be happy if only the cargo hatch opens. The day before New Year’s Eve, a small plane lost a door near Lake Constance. Now, it’s quite common for smaller planes to fly with the door open, especially when parachutists are disembarking. As an ordinary passenger, however, it is usually very important that all bulkheads are tight. (Did it even occur to the infamous Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary that he could also charge passengers a separate fee for properly locking plane doors? But that’s just a side note.)
Back to the suitcase problem. According to everything that is known in this country, neither the airport in Bangalore nor the airline Go First have been guilty of anything significant in this connection. However, both recently, in a mutual failure, left passengers on a shuttle bus en route from the terminal to an aircraft. The plane took off for Delhi without her. As an exception, Go First applied to luggage here.
Stefan Fischer likes the sentence in which the word flies follows five times in a row: flies follow flies, flies fly after flies.
(Photo: Bernd Schifferdecker (Illustration))