How frequent do fail to boards and consequent unloading of luggage cause delays?

[Melburnian1]

Some AFFers are no doubt travelling on 250 different flight sectors per annum, a remarkable achievement - I am including only true paying passengers, not staff. Others still travel often - once a week each way, which is about 90 to 100 flight sectors per annum allowing for holidays, sickness and so on.

How often do you find that your flight is specifically delayed by a passenger who has booked luggage into the hold not turning up - 'FTB' if I recall in aviation industry speak?

Is it one in every 20 flights, or more frequent? Is the delay limited for you to about 10 to 15 minutes or can it be more if the bag takes significant effort to unload (for instance, on an aircraft using containers, the transgressing passenger was among the first to check in and hence his or her bag may be in a container deep in the hold.)

Some time ago pilot and AFF contributor jb747 claimed that (and I am paraphrasing) 'QF routinely unload bags in such circumstances (hence most often causing a delay); other airlines do not (necessarily.)'

Do you find this matches your observations? Which airlines 'do' and which ones sometimes or always 'appear not to'?

Do you find a nexus between larger capacity flights (such as A380s) suffering more from such delays simply because if it is full or close to there are more passengers and hence more chance of one person or more not fronting at the last moment for any one of understandable or conversely inexplicable reasons, or is it worst during school holidays when more parents with children are travelling? Or is there no discernible pattern and similar experiences between domestric and international flights irrespective of the airline involved?

 

[moa999]

Less than 1 in 20 IMHO. Given small number no discernable pattern.

 

[RooFlyer]

I do about 90 sectors a year and have been lucky not to have had many announced delays due to bags off-loading. Maybe one or two a year.

Hard to recall accurately but I think most of them would have been domestic 737s and the like rather than international A380s and I think it may be due to the nature of the journey. A domestic leg is expendable under certain circumstances and you would get proportionally more novice travellers who don't understand the boarding process . If you are on an A380 to LAX I think you would be more focussed and boarding closes much earlier - so missing pax can be found.

Can't differentiate between airlines.

 

[jb747]

I've never tried to keep track of it. Missing passengers are common...I really don't understand how people can calmly walk to the aircraft a few minutes after it's supposed to be gone. Perhaps they rationalise it as 'the cargo doors are still open, so I'm not holding it up'...whereas in reality the cargo doors are open so that we can toss their bags.

So, without an actual record....I'd say that a couple of passengers are late about 25% of the time, but baggage offload only happens about 5-10%...basically because the people are found before we start pulling the bags. If we find you in the duty free, then we might leave the bags behind anyway.....

 

[Melburnian1]

Thank you all. Sort of confirms what I expected, but in a more statistically reliable way since you are all truly frequent flyers.

 

[MEL_Traveller]

To be honest... delays can occur for a variety of reasons, and a late passenger/off loading of bags could be a subset of that delay and hence go completely unnoticed. Plenty of times you might board to be told that 'we're just waiting for final cargo to be loaded'... or 'we're just waiting for connecting passengers'.... while that might be true, they might also be off-loading a bag from a no-show passenger. I'd have no idea, and the time taken to off-load the bag may not have any impact on the final departure time.

 

[chelzmalee]

My bags were offloaded once while I was sitting on the aircraft (long story). I don't recall it causing a delay, though.

 

[jb747]

The trouble with any form of delay is that they have a nasty habit of rippling into much bigger delays. A very simple one..passenger fails to board, luggage is hidden away and it takes 15 minutes to remove and replace the containers. Aircraft misses slot, and next one on offer is in two hours...crew hours can't accommodate that, and the flight is cancelled.

Basically everything has to come together, and the array of things that can cause delays is almost infinite. Sometimes delays are trivia and easily dealt with...but others are disasters.

 

[Melburnian1]

Some airlines have endeavoured to at least partly deal with this by imposing a 'boarding gates close strictly XX (often 10) minutes before departure' rule. Singapore Airlines is one carrier that comes to mind, but in the end it's up to all of us as far as possible to act responsibly and to be on board a reasonable time before scheduled or any airline-initiated amended time of departure.

 

[moa999]

I do wonder whether those single level airports (with gate lounges - eg. SIN, KUL) minimise delays by ensuring pax are well penned in before boarding (as much as I personally hate them). On a recent 3K flight I think everyone was in the pen before the aircraft even arrived (was 15min late)