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Airlines confront baggage mountain

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LONDON, England -- Airlines moved Wednesday to reduce the "baggage mountain" of thousands of items of luggage after chaos at London's Heathrow Airport over Christmas.

Thousands of airline passengers have still not been reunited with their personal items, the UK's Press Association reported.

British Airways, the worst affected airline, told CNN the problem would take "days" to clear, rather than hours or weeks.

A spokesman told PA that there were still "several thousand" bags that had not been delivered to customers.

Many are still stacked up at Heathrow's Terminal 1 and Terminal 4 as BA uses air freighter planes to try to clear the backlog.

A BA spokesman told PA: "The problem began before Christmas when there was a fault with a baggage belt at Heathrow Terminal 4. That caused the initial backlog, and about 8,000 bags were not delivered.

"Then the fog at Heathrow caused further problems, and there was another Terminal 4 baggage belt problem on December 29."

"The fog and the second belt problem led to about 10,000 bags not being delivered. We have put on air freighter planes to get the bags to their owners, and we have drafted in a number of volunteers to help.

"To put the whole thing into context, we dealt with about 75,000 bags a day at Heathrow over the festive period and handled about one million passengers."

The BA spokesman said that the baggage problem had also coincided with changes in working practices for BA baggage handlers at Terminals 1 and 4 ahead of the move of the airline's entire Heathrow operation to the new Terminal 5 in March next year.

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