acaTerry said:
The bags that get left behind get accounted for by the puzzle palace (the tower we call ops). When a passenger raises a stink over the bag getting left behind, UAL/ACA sometimes follows up on it. The CP's office sometimes is too efficient at following up on things like bags getting left behind, although I've only been rebuked once for taking extra fuel when it could have been bags (this was in the summer--and good thing because we juuuuuust landed with legal reserves from all the deviating and holding).
Do you have any idea on how the CP's office can follow up on stuff like that? The pax would really have to bitch if they were to dig up the copies of the FLIFO and double check your numbers. I was the victim of that once, and all of the yellow copies you turn in are thrown in a trash bag and kept in the Ivory Tower. They were fun to find. How did you get busted for taking extra fuel? Did the station have a copy of the release and bitch that because you wanted more fuel than what was on there, they had to leave bags behind?
I've done some work with pax and mishandled bags, and it's no picnic. Once I had to deal with a lady who was insistent that she saw her bags loaded on the J41 and wanted to know why they weren't at the claim area. She was accusing us of lying to her and that her bags were at the airport, either on the ramp or still on the plane and demanding that somebody go out and look for them. Evidently three different people went and checked and she thought everybody was lying to her.
This was an SDF-IAD run, and after making some phone calls to SDF, it turns out that the bags she saw loaded were in fact loaded, and then removed because of a weight restriction. I think SDF is an AirWisky station, and they have no incentive to handle things according to our procedures. They should have removed pax and left the bags, and it turns out that every single bag that terminated at IAD was left behind for the next flight, which is just stupid. To make it even worse, the flight schedule that month had no late SDF-IAD run, and this particular flight was the last flight to IAD. There was a 6pmish flight to ORD, but once the bags got to ORD, they would barely miss the connection to IAD, requiring them to wait an extra 2 hours until the 8:45 departure to IAD. That's right, bags that should have been at IAD at 3:45 wouldn't get in until 11:45. The station got real bitchy and claimed that they were short on time and didn't have time to deal with it.
At the station level, there is lots of finger pointing when it comes to baggage mishandling, but for the life of me, I fail to see how you guys would get nailed for any of that, considering the FOM says that the handling of a weight restriction is up to the CSR's as to what comes off/what goes on. Since you do have "captain's fuel" how can you get nailed for taking a few hundred extra pounds even if that means you leave bags behind? After all, ain't it your plane?
