SimPilotAdamT

You're welcome, buddy!

I haven't seen any pilots do anything too annoying for us, though there have been a couple of things. On a few occasions, I've seen some pilots forget to turn off the anticol beacon lights, which leave us waiting for a long while before attempting to approach the aircraft, even if the engines are off with all power going through the APU. Other times I've noticed aircraft coming onto stand with landing flaps still extended, without having had any kind of suspected bird strike. Since we have to drive our baggage carts underneath the trailing edge of the wings, having flaps 40 extended on your B738 is going to mean that we can't do that, causing minor delays.

Other than that I can't think of anything else. You guys rock up there on the flight deck!

Speaking of, out of curiosity, what planes are you type rated on?

Some of the worst bags to buy are the ones which have no wheels. In my airline, none of our holds are bin loaded, so we have to manually stack the bags inside each hold, and they can get fairly long. If your bag has at least 2 high quality wheels, then it allows us to roll them down the hold quickly, making it easier for us. Otherwise, we have to throw the bags in order to keep to the scheduled times.

My absolute least favourite bags are the ones that have 4 wheels, but one of them is seized up, so we try to roll it down, but it just falls over after moving 6 inches.

We see a lot of bags that look exactly identical to one another going on the same flight. One good way I've seen is to put your own tag on the bag with your name and address, so that you can read this and make sure it's yours. Other ways include using unique straps that wrap around the bags.

To stop stuff getting damaged, you want to have a bag that has 4 good wheels, with soft lining on the inside and a hard outer shell. The wheels are important bc we tend to throw those bags less when inside the hold of an aircraft, and the other features help keep your stuff cushioned.

Finding stowaways is exceptionally rare - I have never seen any myself. It is a legal requirement in the developed West for baggage handling companies to do "hold checks", essentially walking (more like crawling tbh) through the hold, making sure nothing is loose or hidden away inside. Anyone who does have access to the plane once a hold check will be an employee of the airport, the airline, or a third party contractor. When the hold is closed, we do up all the netting and check to make sure everyone who was on the ramp is accounted for before the hold is closed.

The team behind the scenes is actually very big, I'm going to start at the departure end.

At my airport, your bag will first go down a set of automated conveyor belts which send bags down chutes depending on the handling company who is handling your flight. Once down there, one of us baggage handlers will pick up your bag and take off one of the stickers from the airport-issued bag tag (this has critical information including the flight number, date of flight, destination, and a unique ID based on your boarding pass) for record-keeping. We load your bag into the "dolly" (dollies are the trailers we use to drive bags from the terminal to the plane, and vice versa) assigned to your plane. We stick the sticker from your bag onto a sheet attached to the dolly, so we know which bag was loaded onto which dolly. Once a dolly is full, we tow it up using one of those small electric tugs (we call them buggies) you see all over an airport up to an equipment parking area on the ramp. From there on, it's the ramp team who handles the bags. When a plane is in the zone (usually this is defined as being estimated 15-20 minutes from touchdown), either a ramp agent or a baggage handler will go to the equipment park of checked-in bags to collect the dollies of bags needed for their flight, towing them to the correct stand. The plane arrives on the stand, the team does the unload (I'll explain this further down) and then the team starts the onload, in accordance with instructions from the flight's dispatcher, who will tell us how many bags will go into each hold, as well as in what order the bags should go into the hold. Dispatchers have access to the full accurate number for the amount of bags that were checked in using an internal system, so they always know when something is off. The rest of the ramp team are only given an estimate. Once we finish that onload, we secure the hold of the aircraft and it's sent away for a (hopefully) on time departure. If any bags are missing, the dispatcher will radio around, asking if any further bags are still in the terminal, since a flight is not allowed to leave without all of the cargo that was scheduled to be onloaded. If the count of bags is higher than expected, this usually means that we haven't done our job properly, as we are supposed to check the tags of all bags being loaded. In this case, we have to take everything out of the holds, do a count of the bags and physically check all the tags to make sure they're all correct. We then send any bags for a different flight to the correct part of the airport, and then have a tonne of paperwork to do. If anyone doesn't turn up to board the flight, this is recorded on the system, and, if they have checked in bags, we have to go through the hold to find the bag of the missing passenger(s). We have had instances where a passenger has been so late that we finish offloading their bag, only for them to actually turn up for the flight. In that case, they're allowed to board and we have to re-load the bag.

For arrivals, we have empty dollies on hand, with an accurate count of how many bags are on board. We offload all of the bags from the hold and place them into the dollies, before driving them down into the terminal and putting every bag onto the right arrival baggage belt, as assigned by the airport. We aim at being as efficient as possible, here. With the goal of putting the last bag on the belt before the first passenger from that flight is through passport security.

Dollies are generally very secure, but on the off chance that a bag does fall out, then we use the tag attached in order to determine where it needs to go.

You wanted essentially a count of how many ppl are directly involved with your bags. We generally have at least 5 ppl in the terminal dealing with departure bags. Ramp teams generally consist of at least 4 ppl, including a dispatcher and a ramp team leader, but sometimes we can have 10 ppl on a stand helping out with a flight at any one time. You can easily start blaming 30 ppl for losing your bag. Generally we learn from our mistakes, and the procedures that my company uses aims at putting the amount of lost bags to an absolute minimum.

It depends. Generally it can get 5°C hotter inside than out. Last summer, it hit 40°C outside, making the temperature in some holds exceed 50°C. The key for us is finessing technique, as well as drinking a whole lotta water. In that 50°C hold, the guy I was with drank an entire 2l bottle of water to himself.