President Chung Il-young of Incheon International Airport Corp. (IIAC).

Incheon International Airport Corp. (IIAC) held an event to mark handling of its 500 millionth luggage on Dec. 6, about 15 years after its opening.

IIAC’s feat is equivalent to orbiting the earth 11 times if all the bags are lined up in a single line. IIAC’s baggage handling system (BHS) is dubbed “The heart of the airport.” 

“Conveyors correspond to the arteries that can beat the heart.” said Kim Jong-suh, head of IIAC’s flight service division. The BHS is capable of transporting about 58,000 bags per hour, and that may represent the highest-ever in terms of handling speed and volume, he added. 

IIAC’s baggage handling system is enormous. The number of motors installed on belt conveyors and conveyors used to transport bags from flight counters and from airplanes stand at about 15,000. If they are lined up in a single lime, the conveyors would be about 88 km long, or about the distance between Seoul and Cheonan, Chungcheongnam-do. The overall length of IIAC’s conveyers is twice that of Beijing or Dubai international airports.

The combined floor space of the four-story BHS building is 165,000 sq. km, the combined size of 24 soccer fields. 

The crew charged with handling the BHS finds it difficult to imagine traveling without carts. The BHS transports baggage from check-in counters to boarding gates in 26 minutes — a speed of 7 meters per second. Even though the conveyors appear to be simple, they are armed with IT gadgets, including 83 autonomous readers and 36,000 autonomous sensors, advanced enough to get a grasp of information in real time and transporting it in a seamless manner. “IIAC’s BHS is now the subject of benchmarking from major global airports. Officials from Heathrow International Airport and Frankfurt International Airport have recently made an inspection tour to look into the BHS.” Kim said. 

On Jan. 3, 2016, the IIAC’s BHS suffered a glitch involving two conveyors due to a flood of 176,000 passengers, delaying the departure of about 160 flights. The baggage stampede took place within the context of a management vacuum caused by the absence of the IIAC president.

One month later, Chung Il-young, a former official with the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport (MOLIT), took office as the new president of the corporation to pick up the pieces. Under his stewardship, IIAC went into “Emergency management mode” to overcome the crisis stemming from the baggage overload. The corporation replaced the computer server, the brain of the BHS, and all motors in question at a cost of a combined 3.4 billion won to put it on the right track. IIAC President Chung walked the basement floors of the airport about three to four hours daily to make first-hand inspections into the conveyors. 

Manuals on responses to emergencies have been upgraded. Airline and baggage crew officials conducted emergency training exercises on more than 100 scenarios. The process was arduous, but it paid off quickly. The number of delayed bags averaged 248 during the period between February 2015 and October 2015, but the figure fell 72 percent to 70 during the same period this year. The “Delayed bags” rate for the IIAC translates into three cases per 1 million bags, much lower than the average of 21 cases in Europe and eight in the United States. 

A manger with Siemens of Germany, which overhauled its baggage process, said Incheon International Airport is characterized by periodic “Floods” of bags, and the airport’s handling such huge volumes is unprecedented.

IIAC’s baggage handling system (BHS) has undergone an overhaul so that it can transport about 58,000 bags per hour, the highest-ever in terms of handling speed and volume. (Photos: IIAC)