THE BAGGAGE handling company Groundforce, that deals with around 70 per cent of luggage at Portela Airport in Lisbon, has complained that the facilities and infrastructure belong to World War II.
A spokesman for the company, António Matos, who said that things had got worse since last year, said that the facilities at Portela “did not have the capacity to allow all baggage to be dealt with at the same time” so that passengers could not always travel with their baggage.
In an interview with Lisbon daily newspaper Diário de Notícias, he said that the service got behind and the baggage sometimes had to follow the passenger on the next available flight and sometimes even got lost.
The problem is caused by the fact that Lisbon airport is saturated to capacity and also because Portugal’s national airline TAP, Transportadora Aérea Portuguesa, has, in recent years, increased the number of its transfer flights to onward destinations.
For example, between 6am and 10am and between 5pm and 8pm, Portela is processing a lot more transfer passengers whose ultimate destination isn’t Lisbon, with onward bound flights accounting for around 70 per cent of all flights at busy times like August.
Each morning, there are between 12 and 14 outward bound flights while, in the afternoon, 12 to 14 flights from Europe land in Lisbon to unload passengers and baggage transferring on to Africa and Brazil. A flight with 300 passengers from Recife, Brazil, can land at Lisbon’s Portela Airport but only 50 passengers get off at Lisbon. The other 250 passengers are booked onto any one of 14 other flights bound for Europe and the rest of the world.
In such cases, all the baggage has to be unloaded from the incoming plane, where it is taken to the transfer terminal on a baggage belt with a capacity to take 1,800 pieces of luggage an hour. But the problem is that the x-ray facilities at transfers can only cope with 600 pieces of luggage an hour and, in practice, only manages to process 400 an hour.
In António Matos’ opinion, “the infrastructure at Portela Airport simply doesn’t have the capacity to speed up the process because it doesn’t have a modern optical baggage reading system.”
Instead, all suitcases and bags have to be x-rayed and examined visually by a team of 20 Groundforce staff.
Groundforce registers, on average, 18 to 20 stray suitcases for every 1,000 passengers. Between January and July 2006, there were 3,600 mistakes and irregularities per month.
In the same period this year, this figure jumped to 4,000 which meant that the situation got worse by 10 per cent.
When confronted with these issues, a source at ANA (Aeroportos de Portugal) said that “the baggage belts transporting luggage and the whole system involved in this process is working well and is operational.”
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