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Video: Where Your Bags Go

You just want your bags to arrive on time. Reporter Richard Mullins just wants his arms to stop hurting after a day of heavy lifting with the baggage crew at Tampa International Airport.
By RICH MULLINS
The Tampa Tribune

If you’ve flown on commercial airlines recently, you may have stared nose-on-glass at the tarmac workers below with a thought like this: “Please don’t lose my bag. Don’t shred it or crunch it or send it to Brazil. Please.”

I’ve thought the same thing.

And because Tampa is a travel town, I decided to work a day at Tampa International Airport as a baggage handler to learn what it takes.

I tagged bags. I tossed bags. I sorted, tugged, pushed and packed enough baggage to clothe Jamaica, it seemed. And I learned this: Go ahead and pray to the baggage gods to protect your socks. Go ahead and glare at the handler on the tarmac.

But behind that one bag handler you do see are dozens more you don’t see, laboring in a complex, high-speed, grunting ballet to move thousands of bags each day from Point A to Point B. And the airline you curse for losing your bag probably controlled it for only a moment.

So with sore arms and ringing ears, I offer this behind-the-scenes look at life as a bag handler, with a few baggage secrets along the way.

Let’s start with Baggage Secret No. 1: If your bag arrives on time where you do, it’s a minor miracle, but a miracle that happens hundreds of thousands of times a day - only through very hard and fast work.

My boss for the day is Edward Garduno, general manager of airport services at Spirit Airlines, a small, fast-growing carrier in Tampa. Piggybacking on his all-powerful security credentials, I try out every unseen grunt job in the baggage food chain.

The day begins at 5:45 a.m., and the Spirit check-in area is a ghost town - nobody anywhere. But then, at 5:50 - POOF - a huge crowd appears, moms, dads, kids, and 30 Dominican baseball players. Five Spirit gate agents have about 45 minutes to process 150 passengers and 300 bags.

“There’s a reason we ask people to show up at least an hour early,” Garduno says. “We’ve got to get that flight out on time.”

Baggage Secret No. 2: As a passenger, you’re important. But so are the 100 before you and the 100 that follow. The rule here is speed and accuracy, even if passengers have bags the size of motorcycles.

About 6 a.m., a woman shows up with two bags and an 8-foot-tall set of white miniblinds. “She’s flying to Jamaica,” Garduno says. Jamaicans often shop in the United States and bring merchandise back as checked luggage to avoid high prices on the island. “People check anything they can,” Garduno says. “One guy tried to check a car engine.”

(FYI, Spirit will transport just about anything, but not engines.)

As passengers fill up the turnstiles, gate agents pick up the pace and use 100 little tricks to keep things moving. In a coordinated blur, they check passport databases, print boarding passes and bag tags, then staple on yellow or pink flags to signal late or transferring bags - all in a precise motion so bar codes emerge from handles face-up for lasers to scan.

Handles point forward and wheels face up so bags don’t start rolling backward.

If the process is done well, passengers never notice the complexity.

Done poorly, the system seizes in gridlock.

As we load bag after bag, an alarm goes off and spirit agent Lori Lacasse yells, “BAG JAM!” Lacasse jumps down the conveyor shaft with her heels sticking out of the breach like a paramedic reaching into a frozen pond to save a drowning kid. In a flash, she unclogs the flow and hits the conveyor restart button.

Once through that portal in the wall, bags become property of the airport and go into a high-speed, high-security, Alice in Wonderland tangle of conveyor belts. Bags zip by at 20 mph overhead, below our feet, behind and in front - scanned and inspected until a laser eye spots a telltale bag tag. Then - BAM - robot arms shove the bag down a chute toward terminal A, B, C, etc.

Yelling over the sound of the conveyors, bag specialist Brian Moss says bags can move at top speed from curbside check-in to the airplane in “maybe five minutes.”

Baggage Secret No. 3: Print your name in GREAT BIG LETTERS on a sheet of paper inside your bag. Tags can and do tear off in the tussle. I found one orphan tag on the ground: James Gray, Southwest Airlines. Woe be James Gray. Hope he got his bag.

Next, Garduno takes me through a secret door to the tarmac, and we spot a Spirit plane coming from Atlanta - a $40 million Airbus rolling toward us at 30 mph.

When scientists describe painful sounds, there’s a reason they place “jet engine” at the far end of the range toward “fatal.” Rolling closer to us, the turbine engines scream so loud it seems they’re tearing apart the air itself.

In a rush, tarmac workers surround the plane. They have 30 minutes to unload, fuel, clean, inspect, reload and push back the aircraft for departure. Airplanes only generate revenue in the air, Garduno explains.

This is the time most passengers see baggage handlers, and many work for contractors, not the airlines. It’s also when I get my chance to heave bags. I start feeding bags up a conveyor into the belly of the plane and soon make my first mistake - loading bags too closely.

You’re supposed to leave a foot-wide gap between bags because a loader inside the plane is on hands and knees stacking bags franticly. If you think your bag feels heavy pulling it from your trunk, picture doing that 300 times - on your knees. Overwhelm the stacker and you get yelled at. I did.

Baggage Secret No. 4: Bag handlers divide cargo areas into zones based on destination, i.e., one for Detroit, another for Atlanta. That way the next crew can unload bags meant for just their city, not another.

For you office dwellers who think handling bags seems a pleasant job, consider this: The tarmac can reach 110 degrees on a hot day. “This is nice today,” says Paul Carey, a bag handler with the weathered look of someone who works outside. “Last week it stormed like crazy. Oh, man, we got totally soaked.”

Only one thing keeps workers off the tarmac, Carey says. Lightning.

Huge sirens go off if airport sensors detect lightning, and tarmac workers run for their lives because they’re standing on wet ground next to the huge metal passenger jetways from the terminal to the plane door - lightning magnets.

Bags coming off the plane make a short trip on a minitrain to an underground alley behind passenger baggage claim. Here, bag handler Gil Krazinsky shows me how to “flip” bags from the cart to the conveyor that goes out to waiting passengers. With one motion, he throws a bag onto the belt. BAM! Wheels up. Next bag. BAM! Wheels up.

I try. He mocks me. “Nah, you’re lifting too much,” Krazinsky says. He has done this for 27 years and says I’ll break my back if I lift bags. Instead, flip them. He’ll flip 1,400 bags a day, 2,000 on busy holidays.

Baggage Secret No. 5: Pack fragile things in socks.

My last stop is the land of lost bags, a tiny room Spirit maintains to reunite lost bags with hopeful passengers. Not many bags get lost in the big picture, Garduno says. Today, though, bags cover the floor. There’s no one cause for lost bags - weather, extra security scans, passenger overflow.

If another airport’s conveyor system breaks down, bags can show up late. Most times, when your bags are lost, it’s not your airline’s fault. Airlines don’t own the conveyor systems. The government does. Still, passengers blame airlines. It’s a cost of doing business.

Just as Garduno finishes listing the fates that befall bags, a woman walks in looking worried.

“I’m looking for a bag,” says Pat Buscemi, a passenger from Detroit. And there it is, in an orderly stack in the back. “Oh, thank God,” Buscemi says. “It has my husband’s medicine in it.”

Garduno thanks her for flying Spirit. “It takes a lot of work and coordination to do this,” he says. “We do this seven times a day, every day.”

Reporter Richard Mullins can be reached at (813) 259-7919 or rmullins@tampatrib.com.

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