Why do so many passengers arriving at Orlando International Airport have to wait 90 minutes or more before their bags pop out onto a carousel?
How often are departing planes delayed because of luggage holdups?
What triggers hundreds of pieces of baggage to be “mishandled,” the term authorities prefer for accuracy but which passengers think of by another label: “lost”?
With the crush of holiday travel coming soon, these are relevant questions for beleaguered passengers at the nation’s eighth busiest airport as they wait – yet again – next to MCO’s balky baggage carousels. They won’t get detailed answers from airport officials, who don’t have or don’t want to share them.
But in a significant concession, the airport’s leaders now acknowledge the need for solutions as Orlando’s airport gets even busier and its obsolete baggage system struggles to keep up.
The needed fix is expensive, time-consuming and still-conceptual: A full rebuild of the older terminals’ baggage handling systems, costing upwards of a billion dollars and not ready until next decade.
In the meantime, the airport is exploring a short-term solution: Diverting a significant chunk of the 30,000 to 70,000 bags those terminals handle daily to a remote handling facility. How much that would help remains to be seen.
The manner in which tens of thousands of bags a day are shunted around at terminals A and B is akin to an aging car kept running with pliers and duct tape, racing from breakdown to breakdown and overheating. Entering the equipment-stuffed interiors of the airport’s baggage handling – as the Orlando Sentinel did recently – does suggest opening an oven.
“We continue to Band-Aid this system,” said Tom Draper, recently retired airport operations director, who, as others, warned of irritation among travelers and the need for lasting solutions. “We can’t keep putting it off.”
Airport celebrations over opening the glitzy Terminal C in 2022 and inaugurating upscale Brightline train service to Miami last year are being eclipsed now by comparative grunt work; billion-dollar renovations for fixer-uppers, Orlando International’s original terminals A and B.
Airport leaders have documented the terminals’ shortcomings and the list is long, without complete understanding of what needs to be done.
The outer hubs of airline gates have too few bathrooms and food concessions.
Vehicle lanes where passengers are dropped off crowd dysfunctionally.
Roads girding terminal A and B clog with traffic jams.
Parking garages are notorious for filling and closing.
It doesn’t take an expert consultant to recognize those deficiencies – they are obvious to travelers who must cope with them.
But when a passenger flying out of Orlando arrives in another city to learn that their checked bag didn’t also make the trip, it’s difficult for them to fathom what happened.
Airport insiders know that travelers have little clue if a missing bag was a personal instance of bad luck or one of many regular mishaps due to mechanical indigestion in the bowels of Orlando International Airport.
The problems are exacerbated by the reality that baggage handling, in Orlando like other places, involves three main partners: The airport, operating a vast array of machinery and conveyor belts; the airlines, whose workers physically handle bags; and TSA, running baggage scanners the size of UPS trucks, and employing separate rooms where some bags get a closer look.
Each of the partners knows its own missteps with bags but, according to knowledgeable participants interviewed by the Sentinel, has little incentive to share details out of fear of being blamed for those missteps.
“I won’t quote or print your responses,” said Scott Godwin, assistant director of airport operations, seeking to assuage those fears as he reached out to airlines in September for data in his quest to answer “How do we know we have a problem?”
Southwest Airlines – the busiest carrier at Orlando’s airport and, with its free bags policy, the most burdened by far with luggage – declined to comment to the Sentinel.
A primary factor for the aging terminal’s baggage woes is a lack of digital automation able to record and report with precision where and why bags go astray. That requires the sophistication built into the two-year-old Terminal C.
In Terminal C’s modern handling systems, bags are placed in trays with tracking devices that tell where every item is at any time. A and B handle luggage the old-fashioned way, dumping bags on conveyor belts equipped with a limited number of scanners designed to read baggage tags as they zip past.
But the tags aren’t always aligned properly to be readable. Conveyor belts and their mechanical components are vulnerable to breakage, creating traffic jams.
In the recent tour, a Sentinel reporter observed a cave-like room so filled with conveyors, motors, steel frames and TSA scanners that operators and maintenance providers had to contort themselves to get around, squeezing under and between the machines.
Formerly a parking lot, the room was never equipped with air conditioning and swelters to more than 100 degrees at times.
The airport authority’s assessment is there is little to keep or salvage of these baggage systems and that the solution is to abandon them entirely in favor of spacious replacements at the east and the west ends of the terminals.
For critically needed temporary relief at A and B, the airport authority in September authorized a new solution that would mimic an old one called the Disney Magical Express.
The Disney Magical Express was a fleet of buses employed by Disney and operated by the local Mears Transportation, shuttling guests and bags between the airport, resorts and Port Canaveral cruise terminals.
The service, at no extra cost to guests, ran from 2005 to 2022, when Disney pulled the plug.
What was magical for the airport about the operation was the relief from passenger and baggage congestion it provided: millions of travelers never arrived by car at the busy third-level drop off lanes and millions of their bags were never lugged into ticket lobbies.
Instead, distinctively styled “DME” buses stopped on the terminals’ less congested first levels to disgorge passengers, while their bags – at a rate of 10,000 daily, according to an airport executive – were ferried to a facility outside of terminals A and B for TSA security screening.
Unfortunately for the airport, say senior staffers, Disney Magical Express folded during the COVID years and the nation’s post-pandemic yearning for adventure erupted soon after.
Annual passenger numbers broke the 50-million mark last year at the airport.
Orlando’s baggage challenges are even greater than those numbers might indicate, because the vast majority of passengers use the airport for arrivals and departures, and not for connecting flights. The result is a heavier strain, compared to most other airports, on systems that check, screen and return travelers’ bags.
Today, terminals A and B’s baggage systems are “running at maximum capacity and are dealing with equipment at end of life,” said airport consultant Frank Barich in an assessment for the airport authority.
The authority put one of its newest members, Stephanie Kopelousos, in charge of investigating baggage troubles. She brought multiple perspectives.
Kopelousos is the administrator of the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District, the government arm of Walt Disney World.
She previously was director of government affairs for Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida Department of Transportation secretary and Clay County manager.
Known as a policy and detail wonk, but not versed in baggage, she queried a lot of airport executives, aviation consultants, tourism veterans and other outsiders, and conducted site visits.
The Orlando Sentinel obtained her probe’s records, which spell out with some specificity what’s wrong with the airport’s baggage systems.
“The existing outdated baggage system is actually six systems knitted together, but operating separately,” said Richard Clarke, airport authority chief creative officer, in a report to Kopelousos. ”This complexity and fragility makes it very difficult to incrementally improve the system with new technology.”
Kopelousos also gathered anecdotal accounts of long delays and up to 800 mishandled bags on particular days.
In her presentation to the authority, she stressed that much is still murky.
“Obtaining clear and accurate data has proven to be particularly challenging,” Kopelousos said in a presentation of her observations in September. “By improving data collection and analysis, we can better track performance, identify bottlenecks, and implement targeted improvements.”
Her recommendation was for the airport to promote the start up of something like the Disney Magical Express, except it would be more inclusive of the tourism industry and the airport would underwrite some costs.
The airport authority agreed to pay qualifying companies $6.75 for each bag transferred to a remote TSA screening site, easing the volume at terminals A and B, and as much as $25 million annually for that service.
Baggage experts, when asked about the proposal, found it puzzling. They said $6.75 per bag would be lower than the cost of providing the service. Other financial backing would be needed, they said, though from whom remains unknown.
While the authority has authorized the proposal, it hasn’t moved forward with enlisting vendors who would provide the service. Instead, the authority this month held an industry day to solicit further input for “enhanced Baggage and Check-in Services.”
The authority’s hope is to implement novel ways to check passenger bags at remote locations such as resort hotels, convention centers and cruise ports and haul them to TSA screening outside of terminals A and B.
“Passenger experience would be enhanced if they were able to relieve themselves from the burden of bringing bags with them to the airport,” said Anthony Davit, airport chief operating officer, in Kopelousos’ probe.
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