British Airways (BA) officials are saying that only a "handful of bags" are being lost now at their new Terminal 5 at London Heathrow airport, although they don't say exactly how many a "handful" really means.
Furthermore, most of the 28,000 or so bags that didn't accompany their owners have found their way home, although some are still missing in action. These include many of the bags trucked from Terminal 5 to Milan for sorting, and are now being trucked back to the UK for more sorting.
In addition, the insurance companies who said they wouldn't cover passenger bags going through Terminal 5 have changed their minds, after pressure from the government and consumer groups.
Finally, there is speculation that BA may need to rebuild part of the baggage system to increase the amount of storage for bags in case of future problems. The baggage system design assumption appears to have been that system problems would only last a few minutes, and that the numbers of bags not being able to be successfully transferred between flights would be significantly reduced because all BA flights would be operating out of the same terminal.
Alas, as events have shown, the assumption was incorrect.
