Baggage handling —

CAN YOU MAKE IT FLY?

Just working out how many pairs of socks you need when you’re off to the Seychelles, Milan or Timbuktu is a struggle in itself. The transfers also take it out of you. Be it trekking for miles at Frankfurt or misreading signs at Tokyo’s Narita airport. At long last you’re at the conveyor, waiting for that precious bag. Suitcase after suitcase rolls up, people yank them off the belt, but yours is nowhere to be seen. Damnation.

Maybe you feel you’d want to do something about this. Not just to rescue your own bag, but to improve or perhaps even change the whole system of baggage handling. Statistics reveal that 21.6 million bags were, as they put it, mishandled in 2016. Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? Then again more than four billion bits of baggage were handled by airports in 2017. So, whichever way you look at it, baggage handling is a major operation.

The winner doesn’t take it all.

In fact, we’re awarding no less than four prizes this year! Perhaps not surprising as we received close to 2,400 entries from 123 countries around the world. It was a tough job picking the right ones.

The occupiers of the top slot are Batuhan Yildirin and Sena Tasli, recent graduates from Ankara’s TOBB University, in Turkey. Their suggestion on how to make airport baggage handling fly is tantamount to a revolution. The First Prize winner Mobi concept means you don’t even have to bother with your own suitcase!

Second Prize was copped by Kevin Wong of California State University, Long Beach, USA. His entry is a self-automated baggage trolley system. Airtro is built on a solar-powered modular platform.

Uliss won Third Prize for Natthorn Uliss of King Mongkut’s University in Thonbury, Thailand. Apart from being strikingly smart looking, Uliss is a mobile system that offers travellers perfect flexibility.

New this time around is a Public Award. Winner is Dóra Tarcsi of Moholy-Nagy University in Budapest, Hungary. Her Locker invention was selected at the Logiconomi event in Amsterdam, in 2019.