How does KCI airport get your bags on the right flight? Behind the scenes of new system

The new single terminal at Kansas City International Airport is set to have what may be considered its coming out party to the rest of the world this week.

The NFL Draft, which kicks off Thursday in Kansas City, is expected to draw as many as 300,000 visitors. Thousands of those traveling to see the draft will take their first steps in Kansas City when they arrive at the new terminal.

Those travelers won’t see the two-and-a-half to three miles of conveyors that make up the $54 million state-of-the-art baggage handling system installed during the construction of the new airport.

Vanderlande Industries, Inc., of Marietta, Georgia, designed and installed the system over a two-year period before the airport opened for travelers on February 28. The automated baggage handling system, or BHS, is capable of moving more than 2,500 pieces of baggage an hour, and handles on average 8,000 to 11,000 pieces of luggage per day.

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Depending on the time of the year, baggage loads may increase to about 15,000 pieces a day as travelers head out during spring break and over the holidays, said Raymond McMahon, Vanderlande Industries Inc., site manager for Kansas City. “It is a unified system, a shared system,” said McMahon of the new baggage handling system. “So as the bags come down, they can be for Southwest, United, American, Delta, Alaskan, Spirit,” he added.

Before being loaded onto a plane, every piece of baggage travels on a conveyor to a security scan room. “We have six X-ray machines here,” said Ryan Shields, a lead technician for Vandlerlande. “These machines are $2 million apiece and it’s where every bag will have to pass through before it makes it to its final destination,” Shields said. Nearby, a baggage inspector, sitting in front of a large monitor, will have 45 seconds to view the digital images, diverting any suspicious items for further inspection.

Automated bag tag readers route the travelers’ bags through the appropriate conveyors to a specific carousel where ramp agents load the baggage onto a cart. When all the bags for an assigned flight are loaded, a tug truck tows the carts to the plane, where more ramp agents stand ready to load the plane.

In a small room lined with computer monitors, controllers, like Cooper Harris, monitor the entire baggage handling system and the miles of conveyor lines to watch for any jams, which will stop the lines from moving the baggage. “Car seats are the number one reason the line jams,” said Harris, who uses a two-way radio to notify ramp agents of the location of a jam. Employees strive to resolve the jams in a three-to-five minute time frame, said Jacob Rhodes, a lead maintenance technician.

The new baggage handling system occupies about 56,000 square feet beneath an area McMahon called, ‘The Connector,’ an area that connects Concourse A and Concourse B.

“It’s where all the tug trucks go through to pick up the bags and go out to the aircraft,” said McMahon. “Up above us, is where passengers go back and forth between the two concourses.”

The baggage system Vanderlande designed for Kansas City International Airport handles baggage checked in at 40 gates by passengers and airline employees. The system includes eight carousels, referred to as make up units, for outgoing baggage. “Some of the airlines share, some of the airlines like Southwest, they have two or three of them, “ said McMahon. “We have seven baggage claims in the arrivals areas for the passengers as they come back to Kansas City, “ McMahon said. “One by itself, off in international and for the customs area and that’s very seldomly ever used.” There is also a default area where bags are diverted to if the bag tags are not read appropriately. Missing bags are often located by airlines at the default line.

At the old KCI, which had three terminals, every airline had their own system. “Southwest had a conveyor system and they would put their bag on their system,” McMahon said. “It was not shared with any other airline.”

This new, faster, more efficient, more automated and streamlined baggage handling system is attractive to the airlines, said McMahon. “That’s one of the purposes of this kind of system, is it promotes more and more airlines. It attracts them because it is so efficient. It works very well.”