Overloading of conveyor poses problem at airport

Overloading of conveyor poses problem at airport

The Hindu

It cannot carry more than 50 pieces of luggage at a time

# Heavy air traffic has worsened the situation
# HAL Airport handles around 23,000 passengers a day

BANGALORE: Passengers landing at the Bangalore International Airport are sure to be taken aback by its acute shortage of space. But once they clear the emigration procedures in quick time, they relax. Only to be trapped before a luggage conveyor that stops automatically every time the load exceeds the limit.

With the skyrocketing growth in air traffic, overloading of luggage was apparently the most natural thing to happen at the HAL Airport. As an Airports Authority of India (AAI) official said, the airport handled around 23,000 passengers a day, 5,000 of them on international flights.

Frequent flyers like Manoj Kabre of Bangalore understand the demands of infrastructure.

But what greeted him last week was frustrating to even a seasoned traveller like him.

Mr. Kabre, who arrived here from Bangkok by a Thai Airways flight at 11.30 p.m., was shocked to find that the conveyor simply did not work.

As he and his fellow passengers from South-east Asia and beyond watched, the ground handling staff struggled in vain to get it to move.

By the time, the luggage was bundled onto a much smaller conveyor, over an hour had elapsed.

`Sorry state'

For Mr. Kabre, the ordeal was complete when he found foreigners laughing at "the sorry state" of the conveyor and the way such simple things were handled here.

"I felt very bad," he said in an email that was dashed off to the AAI General Manager in New Delhi.

According to Mr. Kabre, the problem was with the placement of cylindrical pillars on the long conveyor. "These small pillars do not serve the purpose for which they are meant. The design needs correction," he said.

The cylindrical steel blocks were not sturdy enough to keep the luggage on the belt so that it would not spill over. Whenever the belt changed direction, the moving luggage would hit anyone standing too close, he said.

Design

But local AAI officials said that the conveyor had been designed that way.

It was equipped to handle about 50 luggage pieces at a time. Every time the luggage went beyond this, it would stop automatically, they told The Hindu. Ground handling staff of the airlines have to lift the luggage from the conveyor belt if the passengers take time to arrive from the emigration counter. If the luggage is not picked up on time, overload is bound to happen and the conveyor would simply halt. "If we bypass it, the motor will burn," the officials said.