Bag detectives kept on the hop

VICTORIA BARTLE delves into the lost luggage office to watch the detectives at work.

Now here's an inexplicable travel story. Imagine your lower leg is artificial. To be comfy on a long-haul flight you might want to detach the prosthesis, even stow it in the overhead luggage compartment to give yourself extra room.

When flying, many of us probably let the flight attendant's modulated voice waft past as they thank you for flying with the airline, wish you the best - and remind you to ensure you don't leave anything behind.

But how could someone with a prosthetic leg - even someone who was deaf or just ignoring that audio - leave the aircraft and forget to take the limb with them?

This story is from the strange-but-true category of Tim Garland's 12-year career tracing baggage for Air New Zealand, a category that includes a privately owned wheelchair left behind on an aircraft.

Garland's office at Wellington Airport receives all unclaimed checked-in baggage, including that inadvertently offloaded along the journey.

If a bag's last journey was an Air New Zealand flight, it comes to Garland, whose job description could well be "the last resort detective."

His office also handles luggage for other airlines, and all of them have access to a world-tracer system which, in theory, should make an easy, tidy job of matching people to parcels, packs and suitcases.

"We all have the same lists of codes we use to describe a piece of luggage," Garland says. "A 'black 25' is a black sports-bag, for example. We have certain words and numbers to describe luggage that might be tweed, multicoloured, floral, pull-along, zipped and lockable - and another 30 codes to describe things like golf clubs, cricket bats and child safety-seats."

The system is usually so efficient that passengers and their luggage can be reunited using a simple description and without detective work reaching the intrusive - and sometimes unsavoury - stage of searching the contents.

"The trouble can come when a passenger describes a piece of missing luggage and maybe their memory of it is just not close enough to fit what it really is," Garland says.

The baggage-tracing experts have done their best to avoid excess detail. For example, the code for red is the same as that for pink or cerise. The system works most of the time, says Garland, and his storage space is "just a room," not a warehouse, as often used in America or Europe.

"Twenty bags might come to me during one month," he says. "That's not a lot when you consider I am receiving unclaimed luggage from all over the world.

"And it's not always easy to find an owner for luggage if they have never reported losing it in the first place. That happens a lot with items like cameras, and we may find they don't even work. We suspect those are the insurance claim cases."

Garland thinks most losses are caused by overtiredness and forgetfulness, particularly when the item is a hat, coat or sunglasses.

But for an item of baggage which has been checked in and ends up taking a lonely and repetitive ride around the carousel, there has probably been a change of travel plans.

The baggage-tracing business is usually much more mundane than discovering an artificial leg or wheelchair.

Sometimes bags contain pornographic material.

Or it could be a smelly, gloves-on job if luggage contains bags of food or unwashed clothes.

Some nationalities love to stock up on exotic spices or dried fish, Garland says. "One bag came in containing 10 tins of ox-tongue soup."

Other items are not so straightforward. "I wouldn't know what some of the powders are if the labels are in foreign languages. But as soon as you open the bag you know they are in there .

"For obvious reasons, we need to dispose of perishables pretty quickly."

Most of the luggage is kept for six months and then most of it, mainly clothing, is sent to charity.

"More valuable items go to auction in Wellington each month, things like cameras, kitchen appliances, calculators and other small electronics.

"On my last list there was a chess set, a wetsuit and three surfboards all in one big travel bag. They were never claimed in the six months.

"In New Zealand we get a lot of woven mats from the islands which are not claimed, though many of them are considered quite valuable. We also get pushchairs, sleeping-bags and lots of umbrellas."

Items left in the cabin are dealt with in Auckland by the baggage-tracing office run by Raewyn Francis at Air New Zealand.

Again, the items are mostly clothing which eventually gets packed up and sent to charity - usually to the Women's Refuge organisation.

"We could probably write a book here about some of the things that happen - when not only a passenger is ringing up looking for something, but so are their aunt and uncle and the airline's customer relations department," Francis says. "It drives me spare sometimes."

Jewellery and cash go straight to the police.

Baggage-tracers are left with shelves of odd items including dentures, spectacles, books, hats, coats, babies' bottles and toys. Some have been left in restrooms or restaurants as well as on the planes.

"It's sad when luggage comes in and it contains a book of family photographs or family heirlooms the owner might have picked up while attending a family funeral overseas," says Garland.

"Those items are of no value to anyone else, so it's frustrating when we cannot trace the owner. But it's wonderfully satisfying when we do."