Bags still missing long after winter woes at JFK airport

NEW YORK Newlywed Ziad Dallal and his wife arrived home in New York, with wedding keepsakes in their bags, to find John F. Kennedy International Airport paralyzed by winter weather woes that cancelled flights, froze equipment and separated thousands of passengers from their luggage.

Ten days later, the couple on Wednesday was still waiting for one of their bags, or even a clear answer on where it was. Last they heard, a local luggage delivery company had it. Or it might be in a Delta Air Lines warehouse in Atlanta.

“Yes, there was a very bad weather situation, but that does not excuse anyone,” said Dallal, a comparative literature doctoral student at New York University. “This is totally unacceptable to me and to my wife and to every passenger, I believe.”

The Brooklyn couple, who flew back from London after marrying in Lebanon, was awakened at 1 a.m. Friday when a deliveryman suddenly showed up with one of their bags, Dallal said. The two cancelled dinner plans Saturday after being told the second bag was coming, but it didn’t.

It’s among a hundred or more bags still at large after a long weekend of dysfunction at JFK, where a Jan. 4 snowstorm and subsequent cold snap spiraled into frozen equipment, arriving flights waiting hours for backed-up terminal gates, a burst water pipe that flooded one terminal and days of delays.

The luggage in limbo is a fraction of the thousands of unclaimed bags that accumulated during the chaos. But it illuminates the magnitude of the breakdown and airlines’ limitations in handling baggage backups.

The industry generally has a good record on luggage: Thanks to improvements in bag-tracking technology and processes, the rate of mishandled baggage has fallen 70 per cent since 2007, hitting a record low in 2016, according to airline technology firm SITA. But airlines aren’t prepared for an unexpected backlog that happens fast, said Robert Mann, an industry consultant and former airline executive.