2023-08-03 22:29:20
“When I arrived, there was a mountain of luggage in front of the check-in, it was when I arrived in front of the door that I tilted”. Ali is one of thousands of travelers to have experienced the gigantic mess at Orly airport on Thursday. After terminal 3, it was the turn of terminal 4 to be paralyzed by a breakdown in the baggage handling systems, causing major delays on the eve of major holiday departures.
The breakdown, of computer origin, blocked “the system for routing luggage to the planes, which is following the check-in terminals”, specified the Aéroports de Paris group to the Parisian. This system did not start in the morning, forcing airport employees to switch to “manual degraded” mode, that is to say, baggage handling by hand. The system finally started working once more around 7 p.m., allowing passengers on evening flights to check in their baggage normally.
It is therefore the planes departing from Paris that have been affected by the delays. In total this Thursday, forty flights were scheduled from Orly and 10,000 passengers were to transit there. Despite the incident, no flights were cancelled.
On the other hand, flights have been postponed to the other terminals of the airport which were not affected by this breakdown. At the end of the day, other planes were transferred to Roissy Charles de Gaulle “for the companies which can do so”, we underlined at ADP. The group also asked the routing system manufacturer’s teams to go to Orly to help solve the problem.
Planes from Air Caraïbes and French Bee even had to take off without checked baggage, said Marc Rochet, the leader of these companies, referring to a “critical situation”. “We will be forced to reroute them within 24 hours, and we already apologize to our customers for this,” he added. We had no other possibility, otherwise we would completely block the system”.
“All arrangements have been made so that luggage that might not be delivered today is delivered on the next rotation”, indicated the ADP group on Thursday evening.
The third time in two weeks
This is the second time in three days that the airport has experienced such an outage. On August 1, an incident blocked the baggage check-in belts in Terminal 3. Employees there too had to manually check in baggage, which caused significant delays. Some flights had left 1h30 or even two hours late. On July 21, a similar problem had already occurred. More than 2,000 suitcases must have been piled up in the hall of the same Terminal 3.
According to the ADP group, this Thursday’s outage has nothing to do with the previous ones. “All the teams are working hard to find the origin” of this unprecedented breakdown, indicated ADP Thursday evening.
“What is happening at Orly is not acceptable”, reacted the Minister of Transport Clément Beaune on the sidelines of a visit to the Gare du Nord. “I know that the teams are mobilized, that we have greatly improved the service compared to last year when there were 35,000 lost bags (in Paris Charles-de-Gaulle following a three-hour strike by ADP employees)”, he recalled, conceding that “we (might) not afford this kind of thing”. “It is exactly this kind of detail that will have to be monitored during major events”, he added in reference to the Rugby World Cup next September and the Paris Olympics.
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