If you are among those air travellers who believe that the earlier you check in for a flight, the later your bags will be delivered at your destination, then this article is for you as, according to baggage loaders on flights, this is a big myth.

This is what they say: When a passenger checks in, his bags are tagged and collected in a holding area before they are loaded on to trolley vehicles to be taken to the right aircraft. Every time you check in a bag, the person checking you in puts a bar code on your bag. In the ‘make’ area, machines read the bar codes to ensure that all bags for a particular flight are loaded on to the right trolleys and taken to the right aircraft.

The process of filling up the trolleys with the bags for a particular flight starts about two hours before the flight takes off.

Needless to say, more than one trolley is needed to load all the bags on to a flight.

How, rather than when

The bags are stacked in an orderly manner on the trolley to ensure that they are tightly placed on the aircraft. Here, when a passenger has checked in is immaterial because where his bags go in will be determined by how they fit first in the trolley and then in the aircraft.

The bags start their journey to the aircraft 30-40 minutes before push-back which is about the time that their owners too start boarding their flight.

A narrow-body aircraft like a Boeing 737 or Airbus A-320 requires two to three loaders to load the bags in the aircraft. “Normally there is a conveyor belt which connects the trolley which brings the bags from the terminal to the aircraft, after which the loaders place the bags in an orderly fashion in the aircraft’s belly,” says a senior airline official.

If you are taking a via flight, say, from Delhi to Dubai to Zurich, you do not see your bags in Dubai though they are offloaded there. The bar codes again ensure that they are put on your next flight and thus reach your final destination with you.

The process is a little different for wide-body aircraft like a Boeing 787 or Boeing 777 or Airbus A-380 or Airbus 350 which require a lift to get the bags into the aircraft because of their height. “On the wide-body aircraft you use containers (carrying the bags which have already been tightly loaded on to them) and there are wheels on the floor of the belly of the aircraft where the bags are stored so that containers weighing 600 to 700 kg can be moved around smoothly,” says an airline person.

In a wide-body aircraft, the containers are wheeled out of the belly of the aircraft and then unloaded on to the ground. However, in a narrow-body aircraft since the bags are individually loaded in the aircraft, they are removed one by one and placed on a trolley to be taken back to the terminal where they are put on the conveyor belt so that the passengers can collect their bags.

Though the planes can carry cargo, priority is given to the bags of the people on the flight when it comes to filling up the belly of the aircraft.

What is also interesting is that loaders point out that it is not uncommon for one set of loaders to be putting the bags into an aircraft for the next flight out while another set of loaders unloads another section of the belly, removing the bags of passengers who have just come in.

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