‘Utter carnage’ after baggage problems at airport

“Utter carnage” unravelled at Birmingham Airport on Friday, according to one passenger, after the airport experienced an “issue” with its baggage system.

The airport issued an alert at 14:00 BST, warning passengers that there was a problem which was impacting some outbound luggage, but that engineers were on site working as quickly as possible to resolve it.

Russell Griffin, who flew from Birmingham to Ibiza on Friday morning, told the BBC that “it had been utter carnage from the point we arrived” and that his luggage, along with many others on the flight, had been left at the airport.

Disruption continued on Friday evening, with passengers on board a Ryanair flight to Girona told by the captain that only 25 of 55 checked bags had been loaded, but the flight would have to depart and luggage would be brought to customers’ hotels on Saturday morning.

Crowds of people queue at Birmingham airport. You can see the back of people's heads as they stand still. — The airport issued an alert at 14:00 BST warning passengers that a problem was impacting some outbound luggage [BBC]

Griffin, from Tamworth, said his Jet2 flight was due to depart at 07:05 BST, but it was delayed for two and a half hours and it left without 70 bags that should have been on the plane.

He said: “We boarded the plane at around 06:35 BST and everything appeared normal, until the pilot made an announcement that bags had not been loaded due to the fact all the carousels were still down inside the airport.

“He read names out of people who had their bags and those who didn’t, but, the majority of the people stayed on the plane.

“Due to the fact people had booked with Jet2, they would have potentially lost their money if they’d got off the plane.”

He added: “The airport has been catastrophically bad – it put an announcement out in the afternoon, but it knew of the problem in the morning, and they should have told us before we got to the airport.”

Griffin told the BBC that the passengers on his flight had to drop their bags off at Zone D instead of Zone A, due to the baggage carousels not working, and he said there “must have been a hundred bags parked there.”

He added: “All of the Jet2 flights from this morning would have been affected”.

A Birmingham Airport spokesperson said: “We are experiencing an issue with our baggage systems which is impacting some outbound luggage. Engineers are on site and working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible. Terminal colleagues are also working hard to ensure baggage in terminal is being processed as quickly as possible.

We expect this to cause inconvenience for some passengers, and we sincerely apologise for this. Those due to travel today, should still arrive at the airport in line with airline advice.”