I flew to Denver before Christmas (boy are my arms tired). My flight was about an hour late departing, and almost as late arriving in Denver. After arrival, it was a full ninety minutes before my luggage appeared at its designated baggage claim carousel. Said carousel was delivering luggage simultaneously from at least four different aircraft, all of which were pretty big planes. I’m guessing the slow delivery of my luggage was related to that last detail.
Meanwhile, many adjacent carousels were sitting idle. So what’s the deal? Knowing that my plane was arriving late and its designated carousel was currently being used by other flights that had (presumably) arrived on time, why couldn’t the airline (Delta) deliver my plane’s luggage to one of those other carousels, mitigating the crowding and speeding up delivery of luggage? Is their own system inflexible, or is it the airport that is unable to accomodate changes like this?
I’m guessing that the delay is in emptying the planes and running the luggage over to the terminal, rather than loading it on the carousel. If so, using the same personell to load luggage from all four planes frees up workers to go work outside instead.
Was there a continuos stream of luggage, or did it arrive in bursts? If it was the latter, then my theory probably holds.
Don’t forget the delay while the ground personnel rifle through the bags to see if there are any good presents in them. This can take quite a while.
I suspect the delay had more to do with not having enough staff on hand to process the delayed luggage, rather than what belt it came out on. The luggage crew probably had to unload other planes before getting to yours and it might have been quicker to do that at the same belt where they were already working, rather than transfer to a new belt.
A pile-up of planes arriving at the same time (some late, some early, some on-time) creates an extra workload for the ground crew and airport facilities.
For every plane, the luggage needs to be manually removed from the cargo holds, placed on carts, brought to the airport, loaded onto the conveyor system and moved to a carousel. If the normal schedule only requires one work crew to service Delta aircraft and suddenly there are four planes, that one crew (or two or however many) isn’t suddenly going to increase in size - they will do the planes one at a time, and not necessarily in the order the planes arrived in. The reason for that is simply that not all servicing vehicles/trolleys are suitable for all planes…a cart-train thingy that can hold the luggage on each of the Embraer 190s that are waiting will not be able to handle the capacity of the late-to-arrive B767, for example.
I don’t know the layout of Denver’s airport, but I don’t recall Delta having a dedicated terminal there. It’s possible - though this is a WAG - that the ground/baggage crew only has access to one part of the conveyor system, and that system funnels baggage to Carousel #4, but not to the others (in other words, all Delta baggage ends up at Carousel #4, no matter the time of day). If all the waiting planes were Delta planes - or their codeshare partners - then there may have been no real means to get the luggage to another carousel.
Limiting access of one airline/carrier to one part of the baggage system is both a matter of simplicity and security. Things are less likely to get lost if they all end up in the same place, even if they get there late. Having all the passengers wait in one spot is easier than having them spread out around two carousels, even if they are adjacent. Baggage crew can only access certain bags and areas, so opportunities for theft or other problems are reduced, etc.