Airline Baggage

Our thirteen hour night-time flight westwards from Korea, across the Soviet Union and into European airspace, was uneventful and bland…so typical of modern transcontinental air travel. Every day, hour on hour, thousands of aircraft criss-cross the globe relentlessly moving people and cargo from one country to another. The reliability, efficiency and safety of all this activity never ceases to keep the Bazflyer's in awe.  Its akin to magic that one's luggage can disappear down a conveyer belt at the check-in desk and then reappear with 99.9% reliability after disembarking in another country thousands of kilometers away!

Thanks to the airline industry's unending quest for safety and internationally accepted regulation, modern air travel has become the safest form of mass transportation operating today. Aviation safety records and industry statistics stand as testimony to this fact. So how is it that even a casual aviation incident so frequently becomes a media headline?  News flash…"airliner with 180 passengers lands safely at Auckland Airport after reporting a hydraulic systems failure shortly after takeoff".  No mention the aircraft by its design had fully redundant hydraulic systems. No mention the crew were simply conforming to their 'safety-first' airline operations policy. 

The Bazflyers often wonder what motivates our media when it comes to headlines and aviation serves as a graphic example. A private light aircraft crash becomes an instant headline even although the sole occupant pilot was uninjured. On the same day there may have been several vehicle crashes on our roads were the occupants were injured and none of these warranted even a passing mention by the media. Why this distinction…?

Our route from Seoul to Berlin necessarily took us first to Madrid where our Boeing 777 touched down in the calm stillness of a pre-dawn morning. Later, from the precinct of a somewhat tired airport lounge we watched the light of a new day color the sky…a scene that seemed appropriate for my imaginary Madrid. 

From here our Korean Air flight continued on to Amsterdam where there was more waiting before the final hop, this time courtesy of KLM, from Amsterdam to Berlin And in case you were concerned about our luggage? There it was, just like magic, riding along the conveyer belt for the Bazflyers to collect….