Where are the suitcases that do not arrive? REALLY WHERE?
Check in, that little luxury of taking the weight of the 'just in case' off your shoulders during the trip. You never gave it much thought, although that was until the moment you found yourself in a foreign airport, on the other side of the world, 36 degrees in the shade while wearing corduroy pants . What about my luggage? Drama. The Spanish proverb already warned: You never know what you have until you lose it . And it happened. “It is possible that it will arrive on the next flight” A voice on the other side of the counter tries to reassure you. In the next? And what is he doing there? Mystery. It seems that your suitcase has found a better flight than you or is asking you for a time.
With the excitement of travel, you may never have asked yourself, but behind the conveyor belt at El Prat airport, the second busiest in Spain, your bags still have to travel 23 kilometers of climbs, descents, forks and endless controls until you get on the plane.
This will be your happy face when they get lost.
According to Aena, in El Prat only 0.01 out of every thousand suitcases do not reach their destination. Bearing in mind that each year this airport moves about 15 million of them , the chances of it being yours are pretty remote though not impossible . To look on the bright side, 40% of these incidents have to do with delivery delays. "Just because it hasn't arrived doesn't mean it's lost" , they explain to us from the SATE Control Center (Automated Baggage Handling System), offices full of screens from where They control each one of the checked bags. They are the ones who ensure that they all advance correctly through the tapes.
But if it doesn't come, then where is it? well, or there was little layover time between one flight and another (of the five you took to save a hundred euros) and it's on its way somewhere; either has been mislabeled at the counter and its destination is uncertain ; or still at the airport because has not passed the different levels of security.
Every suitcase has an identifier. A kind of bar code that they place at the check-in counter and that will make your luggage unique from all the others , although later on the tape when you pick it up you cannot differentiate it and you end up taking that of a 73-year-old man from Soria whose handkerchiefs embroidered in white don't quite hit you. That code will not prevent your premature aging, although it will make the suitcase does not get lost along the way. A reader will be the one who indicates to those responsible for control and to the different machines that: "This is María García's suitcase", and that is when add the ID and the destination to prevent half the airport from claiming it.
This is when they check them out for you.
Once it is ready and tagged, then you can continue on your long way. For this you must pass different security checks. In total there are five, although for security reasons we will only deal with some of them. The first is pretty obvious: all bags go through a scanner where it is checked that they are in order. Depending on the results, it will continue on its way or, if it is considered suspicious , then it will be discarded from that tape and will go to another level of security more or less hard.
This control surely sounds familiar to you: "Please, María García, present yourself at the boarding gate." All my life wishing they would call us on the public address system and it turns out that it is a brown. Those people they name, and you never really knew what it was for, they are suspicious . Well they don't. your suitcases. In Spain, unlike other countries, It is forbidden for security personnel to open suitcases without the owner's consent. A fact that the United States made fashionable and that made We all needed to have a TSA lock if you didn't want it to get smashed.
Here that does not happen. In the event that those of SATA may consider that your hair dryer may pose a threat to other passengers, it's your turn to declare . Micro, little walk in front of the boarding gate to a closed room under the gaze of those who are already waiting anxiously, even if there is half an hour left for the flight, and to remove all the luggage . With what it had cost you to put it all together. In the worst case, if you don't attend the call , either because you fell asleep or because María García could be anyone but you, then here is a problem . your suitcase possibly will not travel with you and will stay there until it is inspected.
And yours?
As a curiosity, The tapes have different speeds. Some go without pause but without haste, and others to six meters per second . This is the one you get when they are about to close some flight and you have arrived at the last moment. If, on the other hand, you are one of those who arrive with four hours in advance , then many airports such as El Prat have a warehouse where they keep them until departure time so they aren't going around the tape and collapsing or getting lost. In the event that you do not take the plane, the suitcase will not fly either.
That it arrives dirty, broken, dented or as if a plane had passed over it It will depend on the waiters who take them to the cellars. We have all seen this from the window, praying that the one they left in the middle of the track was not ours. But it is. just like you know that you will be seated next to a baby who is teething , and behind a gentleman who will recline his seat when you have the beer resting on the tray. The good thing is that, even if you have to buy another new suitcase for the return, with a bit of luck you will arrive with all your things at the destination, or so the statistics say. But, We will always have hand luggage.
By the way, did you know that There is only one airport in the world where, since its foundation in 1994, no suitcase has ever been lost? It's about the of Kansai, in Osaka.
I'm sure Audrey never lost one.
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In London, they waited without getting excited.