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.
Here’s what we’re doing now! —
Let us just first say that we were blown away by the sheer number of entries for our fourth design competition. We received a staggering 2,397 proposals on how to make baggage handling fly.
So, our jury of six, who’d met up at Vanderlande HQ, in Holland on 5 November, had quite a task. Eventually, after a fair bit of back and forth, we agreed to take a closer look at 240 submissions.
Still, we weren’t half way there. What finally came out of that pretty exhausting first jury session was a tight little group of 14 semi-finalists. Some great stuff there!
In January next year, a second jury will be whittling down that select group even further. And in February, if all goes according to plan, we’ll finally pick three winners. (That should be nice!)
The lucky three, who’ve made the grade, will be announced in April, 2020.
