American Airlines Has Changed How Checked Bags Move At Dallas

There’s two kinds of luggage, carry on and lost. That’s especially true at American Airlines, but they’re doing something about it.

I don't want to check a bag. I try to avoid that. I use my laptop bag to board last on overnight trips. I don't have a way to avoid it on long international trips.

Southwest Airlines has more people check their bags than any other airline, even though they don't offer international flights. The checked bags are bundled with the ticket price.

According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, airlines that charge for checked bags are more likely to lose luggage than airlines that don't. More than 450,000 checked bags have been mishandled by American Airlines so far this year.

Dallas-Fort Worth is the largest hub. It was built to house hubs for American, Braniff, and Delta in different terminals. You can check in at the terminal and pick up your bag there.

American uses 140 gates to operate out of all five existing terminals. The grounds of the airport are bigger than Manhattan. There are challenges presented by this.

• Moving people for connections, mostly done by airport train
  
• Moving spare parts for maintenance, which can be consolidated by trying to keep fleet times contained to a specific terminal
  
• Moving checked bags from one flight to another

They are doing a lot with process improvements and those are driving down their rate of mishandled bags.

American is trying to get connecting bags off of planes first to give them more time to connect. It is still difficult to move bags across terminals and flights.

American hasn't had a single centralized bag room with separate terminals. The terminal has its own. The way connect bags worked until recently is described in an internal note to employees.

Until recently, Fleet Service team members from each mainline terminal would bring bags to every flight, which meant multiple trips from multiple terminals to multiple gates.

Fleet service crew chiefs came up with a plan to combine the separate bag rooms into one. The connecting bags are assigned based on historical data on which terminal each flight will use.

While bags with shorter connection times are delivered aircraft to aircraft, bags departing on later flights are now brought to a central location. “We’re assigning a home base for groups of cities,” explained Crew Chief Tim Bapp.

“This makes life a lot simpler because everyone knows where to go with each bag. We know that Miami bags go to the Terminal A bag room, Mexico City bags go to the Terminal C bag room and El Paso goes to D.”

The team looked at historic data to determine the likely location at DFW where each flight departs. Since flights to MIA tend to leave out of Terminal A, connecting bags for MIA departures (leaving in two hours or more) are now sent to the Terminal A bag room.

They co-locate nearby airports in the same bag room so that luggage can be re-routed when passengers change destinations. The bag room is used by Washington National, Dulles, and Baltimore. This information is included in the airline's gating tool.

Employees moving more bags to each destination focus on 8 to 10 flights per shift rather than 20 flights. The number of mishandled bags has fallen since the start of the year.