How have we not solved the issue of getting everyones baggage off the plane in a timely manner. We've been using these conveyor belt-carousels for over 50 years and the same process for loading and unloading, but people shouldnt have to plan on waiting 45+ minutes after they deplane for their personal belongings in 2025. Lost luggage? The whole system seems archaic to me.
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If you think about the complexity of routing bags from a single plane on to potentially dozens of connecting flights and onto the non-connecting carousel, it's actually amazing that the process is not screwed up more frequently.
I mean the bags have barcodes with their destination on them.
Of course, but no one is taking the bag physically so its destination. They're putting them on moving pathways that are matched to ever-changing information about gates, flight numbers, etc.
Flights arrive early or late or never at all, gates change frequently due to airport congestion. And the workers who are managing this are not known for their precision, so it has to be a super fault tolerant system.
Alaska guarantees bags within 20m of landing. It’s not impossible, most airlines just don’t give a shit because people tend to mentally blame the airport not the airline for baggage experience issues.