“The loss of luggage at Ben Gurion Airport is due to clutter by the airlines,” said Transport Minister Merav Michaeli in a briefing during which he detailed the steps that will be taken to deal with the congestion at Ben Gurion Airport. The finger of blame in front of the airlines is quite surprising since those responsible for the baggage of the airlines (apart from that of EL AL passengers) are companies that provide ground services, whose employees are responsible for loading luggage on the planes and unloading them.
Either way, the minister claimed that “luggage that is not supposed to arrive here or that luggage arrives on time is the responsibility of the airlines.”
The minister referred to a publication from the last few days in Mako, according to which an employee at Ben Gurion Airport was allegedly engaged in looting luggage and personal equipment of passengers and even throwing some of it in a trash can at the airport. By an employee of the Maman company (which provides ground services, MARH) in which a cleaning worker is seen looking for recyclable beverage containers in the trash.
The claim is that the employee who was removed from Ben Gurion Airport back in 2020 where he worked in the casualty and reality department but behaved inappropriately – finished a video in which old luggage left over three months and instead of undergoing a compression procedure, went to the trash. Baggage that is not required for three months is destroyed. We further noted that out of 30-40 thousand luggage that passengers deposit daily, the vast majority manage to board flights while a marginal number of luggage is left behind. The promise is that the issue will be addressed by a reinforcement of manpower that will take care of finding the luggage holders who are waiting on the ground and who are also seen landing in the departure hall.
A chain of delays
A rather hurtful recommendation that was heard from the Network at the briefing is not to arrive at Ben Gurion Airport within more than three hours before a flight. The promise is that planes will wait for passengers and the request stems from unnecessary loads that are created as the company counters do not open in a period of more than three hours and therefore bottlenecks of loads and passengers standing in the terminal are created in vain. Will the airlines agree with this statement? Uncertain – any delay in takeoff – and these are happening more and more today – leads to disruption in passenger plans, miss of connecting flights and a chain reaction of delays after landing and before takeoff again.
The Minister of Transport explained why at Ben Gurion Airport the approach is not to reduce the flight schedule as taken at various airports in the world for example in the US, the Netherlands, Canada and the UK, saying that “citizens were not prevented from flying after waiting so long and ticket prices increased.”
Reshet launched a campaign to recruit employees with a budget of NIS 30 million as incentives for new and permanent employees. (From 17.7 for flights with El Al only at this stage.) The Authority hopes to arrive better prepared for the year 2023 through the implementation of technology and increased manpower. The four stations that passengers pass through, security characterization, flight registration, hand luggage and border control, data from May-June-July were not published.
In the run-up to the upcoming elections, Michaeli did not spare criticism from her predecessors in the role of “The traffic jams we see on the roads and the congestion we see at Ben Gurion Airport stem from years of neglect, conduct that did not see enough of the past and did not plan ahead and worry about things happening. If they had taken care of the map of the airports in the State of Israel and would have spent time not only planning but also carrying out the context of closing Sde Dov without any alternative – if they had done things in time properly, we would not have reached today’s situation. “Ben Gurion Airport reached a congestion point even before the corona, there was a feeling that the corona was buying time in the corona, so guess what? Returning from the corona from zero to a century was faster and no one expected it to happen.”