Your Bag's Hidden Journey From Check-In to Plane

New York Times

11-03-2025

Visuals by Graham Dickie
Text by Christine Chung
Checking a bag is an exercise in trust. The hope? That you will be reunited painlessly with your possessions after many labor-intensive steps involving heavy machinery and numerous workers, often across multiple airports.
While several million bags end up getting lost or damaged by U.S. airlines every year, the overwhelming majority of checked baggage (some 480 million bags in 2023) are returned to their owners.
Checking your bag involves a significant amount of human effort: The average checked bag flown with Delta Air Lines is guided by nine people, including ticket agents and a handful of baggage handlers.
We recently spent a day at LaGuardia Airport's Terminal C, to get an inside look at the journey of a bag checked with Delta.
At the check-in counter
Our bag was checked onto DL994, a daily flight departing LaGuardia at 12:59 p.m. and bound for Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
Ideally, checking a bag takes just a few minutes, barring long lines at the terminal. Customers begin the process at a self-service kiosk or at the counter with a ticket agent. (T.S.A. PreCheck travelers flying Delta can shave off more time by using Digital ID, a document-free process that relies on biometrics.)Bag tags are printed with essential information about your itinerary, including whether you have a tight connection. A chip with radio frequency identification technology is embedded in the tag — about the size of a nickel — and scanned at different points, providing regular location updates to the airline.
After the tag is attached to the bag, a ticket agent takes the luggage and places it on the conveyor belt, which transports it to be screened by the Transportation Security Administration.
T.S.A. screening
Within a few minutes, the bag reaches T.S.A. screening. The agency uses C.T. scanning machines, which allow for 3-D analysis of a bag's contents. T.S.A. agents don't need to be present for this step.For Delta and the overall airline industry, the number of passengers — and checked bags — has risen steadily in recent years.
If a bag is flagged, it trundles on the conveyor belt over to a second room for additional screening.
Here, T.S.A. agents may open it, breaking luggage locks if necessary, and pore over the contents to ensure there aren't weapons, explosives or other threats. Overstuffed bags can complicate this process, agents said. Duffel bags aren't easy to sift through, either.
Agents will leave a notice of baggage inspection, playfully referred to as a 'T.S.A. love note.'
The process for pets traveling as checked baggage differs. Pets don't travel on the conveyor belt and are screened by hand, a T.S.A. spokeswoman said. And the animals are loaded into the plane last and unloaded first upon arrival, a Delta spokeswoman said. Oversize luggage continues on the conveyor belt after screening, like other baggage.
Ramp agents are constantly monitoring luggage flow on the conveyor belts. Jams can be caused by irregularly shaped or damaged bags and loose straps or zippers. Checked toolboxes, which can snag the belts, are also a culprit, T.S.A. agents said.
Last year at LaGuardia, Delta handled four million checked bags on 81,000 flights, a spokeswoman said. Across its entire operations worldwide, Delta handled more than 145 million checked bags in 2024, about five million more than the previous year.
The bag room
The conveyor belt system at Terminal C is lengthy, clocking in at about three miles. The belts move the luggage from bag drop to screening and then to a carousel in the baggage room. Ramp agents then hoist the luggage into carts driven to the plane.Bags are loaded into carts and organized by whether they're local (to be picked up at the next destination), connecting or 'hot' — at LaGuardia, that refers to a bag that has a connection of less than an hour. Then ramp agents drive the carts to the planes.
Agents can heft hundreds of bags daily. They take pride in the neatness and efficiency of their 'stack,' said Jordan Machado, a ramp department manager for Delta at LaGuardia.
Stacking bags is 'a whole competition sport' among the ramp agents, Mr. Machado said.
Onto the tarmac and onto the plane
Ramp agents face a number of challenges inherent to the job: noisy conditions, inclement weather and strain on the body. Delta refers to these employees as 'industrial athletes.'
For each departure at Terminal C, there's a handful of agents handling luggage: a pair pulling the bags off the belt and a trio getting the bags loaded onto the plane and prepping it for takeoff.
For DL994, ramp agents began loading bags into the plane's cargo hold shortly after noon. The number of bags that can fit depends on the type of plane and on stacking strategy, like a game of Tetris. Each bag is scanned again as it enters the hold.Bags are loaded into different bins depending on factors that include connection time and whether the passenger is in a priority cabin. (Upon arrival, this generally means that elite Delta fliers will get their bags unloaded first.)
Graham Dickie/The New York Times