AIRPORTS Company South Africa (ACSA) has announced that the technical issue that affected the baggage sortation system in the domestic terminal at OR Tambo International Airport has been successfully resolved.
The glitch, which occurred on the morning of 22 December, saw several domestic passengers’ bags being left behind when some aircrafts departed from the airport without all baggage on board.
Several flights were also delayed to allow for luggage to be loaded.
Terence Delomoney, the group executive operations management at ACSA, said they made arrangements with the respective airlines to enable affected passengers’ bags to reach their owners timeously.
Delomoney said they have noted that the technical issue that affected the baggage sorter was not the result of wear and tear or a lack of maintenance as it was said before, but rather due to an incident that led to the physical breakage of an electro-mechanical sensor.
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“The problem has been resolved and the entire process continues to be vigorously examined. We are now working hard to ensure that the remaining backlog of short-shipped bags is cleared as soon as possible,” he said.
He said out of a total of 77 569 bags processed at OR Tambo International Airport on 22 and 23 December, 31 118 were domestic and regional and of these about 4 500 were short shipped.
He said they now had less than 80 bags in the network, from the original approximately 4 500 that needed to be sent to their owners.
“ACSA apologises for the significant disruption to these customers over this Christmas period and also wants to assure the public that it has taken all possible steps to work with airlines and other stakeholders to resolve the issue.
“ACSA can report that four domestic and regional airlines, FlySafair, Airlink, Lift and CemAir were affected by the intermittent stoppages experienced by the baggage sorter. These airlines suffered significant delays and backlogs of bags left in the basement of the terminal for two consecutive days,” he said.
Delomoney said due to the problem, most domestic airlines decided to delay flights and wait for passengers’ bags to be loaded.
“This was due to most flights being full and no space being available on later flights to transport short-shipped bags to their owners.”
He said the major concern from airlines flying to regional destinations was that most passengers travelling to Mauritius, Victoria Falls and Mpumalanga were travelling for the holidays, so it was important that all bags made it onto their flights.
