Mishandled luggage update

Well Qantas managed to find my missing suitcase and delivered it to me later the same day. Turns out it was loaded during the transfer at LAX onto the Qantas flight to Sydney rather than the Qantas flight to Brisbane. Of course they didn't tell me that - I'm only the customer, why do I deserve an explanation of what went wrong?- I figured it out from the various tags that had been attached to my suitcase to route it back to me. They did a similar thing in 2004 when I took a flight from Sydney to Wellington, New Zealand but somehow they loaded my bag on the flight to Auckland. That time there wasn't even a transfer involved!

Anyway, I'm not quite sure how that mixup happened. It's not like the airport codes (SYD and BNE) are similar. But what's more worrying, is that after the downing of Pan Am flight 103 at Lockerbie in 1988, airlines were supposed to introduce systems to ensure that baggage was not loaded on passenger aircraft without the corresponding passengers being aboard. That was 17 years ago and this process, known as baggage reconciliation, is either not happening or doesn't work.

A friend in the airline industry tells me that Southwest is considered the benchmark in mishandled luggage and that their rate is 3 per 1,000 or 0.3%. I'll look for published data for Qantas and United but I'd love for them to lose my luggage that infrequently.

We also discussed the key difference between the way airlines handle luggage and the way Fedex et al handle packages, namely that Fedex scan the package at every point that it is handled and transferred. Airlines don't, so once your bag goes down that chute behind the check in agent, nobody really knows where it is.

The solution is likely to be RFID tags which would allow the bags to be automatically identified every time they pass by a reader. That would give airlines real time updates every time a bag is put on or taken off a plane. Once that happens, it should be virtually impossible for a bag to be loaded on to the wrong flight or a bag to travel on a plane without its owner. You read it here first!