Last week, it was reported that London Heathrow's Terminal 5 problems have greatly abated, but they haven't gone away, and may flare up again. British Airways (BA) Chief Executive Willie Walsh admitted at a conference at London's Institute of Directors that the baggage system was still not working properly.
BA ended the first quarter of 2008 with the most lost bags of any European airline (270,106 bags). BA lost 28.9 bags per 1,000 passengers, up from 22.4 bags per 1,000 passengers in the last quarter of 2007. The odds given for losing a bag on BA was said to be 1 in 34.
Walsh blamed the problems on Terminal 5's disastrous opening and the crash of its Boeing 777 at Heathrow in January. He also said another reason was because BA took baggage handlers from its other Heathrow Terminals (1, 3 and 4) over to Terminal 5 to train on the new baggage system there: "Staffing levels were lower than usual in Terminals 1, 3 and 4 because we were running test and training operations in Terminal 5."
In that case, the total number of lost bags attributed to Terminal 5 should be both the ones lost both during the chaotic opening, and those lost due to staff training. It's also too bad Walsh didn't tell all BA passengers that their bags were at higher risk of being lost during that training period, which started the previous September.
The problems of lost baggage has gotten so acute not only for BA but for other European airlines as well that the Association of European Airlines announced that it would be providing lost baggage statistics only on a half-yearly basis, not quarterly as it has always done before. It claims that this isn't to hide embarrassing bad news, but that people (i.e., the press) were giving too much significance to the numbers.
Right.
