Baggage handlers get a bad name amongst travellers - frequently nicknamed ‘throwers’, it’s always the first story of the summer when someone’s luggage gets lost or damaged, and it’s always the baggage handlers’ fault.

I’ve been doing this job for a couple of years at a major British airport while I work my way through university and I really think baggage handlers get a bad rap: everyone’s quick to jump when one suitcase gets lost or damaged - naturally, due to Murphy’s Law, it’s always an MP or a celebrity of some description that this happens to - but no one ever thinks about how much luggage we handle on a daily basis. In 2007, our airport had 68,068,304 people through it; assuming each of them took their baggage allowance of two or three bags depending on their destination, that’s an awful lot of luggage and the vast majority of that went in and out of our stillages safely.

A lot of the time when someones baggage gets damaged, it’s down to one thing - their bad packing. Overfilled suitcases have a habit of popping open at the slightest touch, and this can happen before they’re even put in the stillages, let alone once they’re in there with other bags and cargo stored on top of them.

There’s also the habit people have of putting next to nothing in their bags, but still expecting it to be stable when there’s a little bit of weight put on it as tends to happen when they’re stacked in the stillages - put simply, that’s not likely to happen.

Sometimes bags just go missing; they get caught up in the machinery somewhere - often due to bad packing or just bad luck - or they fall off the conveyor belt and are either picked up by another passenger by mistake or fall in a part that nobody checks for a while and the plane has left before the error can be rectified. It’s very rare that cargo goes missing once it’s been put into a baggage handlers hands and makes it into the stillages, though it does occasionally happen if there are a lot of busy flights going in and out at once. Sometimes the cargo will get put in the wrong storage container and consequently go on the wrong flight, or something like that, but it’s a lot rarer than the newspapers would have you believe.

Being a baggage handler is hard work, and it’s frequently a thankless task, with a lot of negative press every time a celebrity’s ridiculous bag has a couple of sequins knocked off in the stillages, but considering the volume of traffic we get and the amount of bags we handle, I don’t think we do too badly.

Anna Stenning is a part time baggage handler and student who feels that they get the short end of the stick when items are damaged in transit or storage. Find out more about airport stillages at http://www.avatan.co.uk/

[tags]Stillages[/tags]