Airports with delayed flights

Most travelers have at some point experienced that special kind of airport purgatory: staring at a departure board while the word DELAYED quietly destroys whatever hope you had left.

The Association of European Airlines recently produced a list of the European airports with the worst delays. And the winners, if “winner” is really the word we want to use here, are:

1. London Heathrow
2. Madrid Barajas
3. London Gatwick
4. Paris CDG
5. Barcelona

Heathrow, apparently not content with merely keeping you trapped in the terminal, also tops another less prestigious list: lost luggage. An average airport loses around 2 bags per 1000 passengers. Heathrow manages an impressive 80 per 1000. At that point, “lost luggage” starts sounding less like an unfortunate accident and more like a business model. Put 500 passengers on a jumbo jet and roughly 40 of them could arrive without their bags. Welcome to London. Your underwear is somewhere else.

Hello Heathrow. Anyone seen my socks?

One reason is the tight transfer times between Heathrow’s terminals. Another is the underground luggage tunnel to Terminal 4, where apparently a single bag getting stuck can trigger the sort of logistical catastrophe normally associated with military retreats and badly organized weddings.

And what happens to all those orphaned suitcases? After three months, they leave Heathrow for auction houses such as Greasby’s, which sells around 300 bags a month. Many are sold unopened. It’s essentially airport archaeology with bidding: somebody pays a few pounds and discovers whether they’ve bought designer clothes or dirty socks.

If you’re traveling with SAS in Sweden, lost luggage gets a slightly longer afterlife. It stays for five days before being moved to Copenhagen. Six months later, whatever remains can end up at Topauktioner.

I’ve been fairly lucky over the years. Despite spending an unreasonable amount of my life in airports, I’ve only suffered two major luggage disasters, one in Brazil and one in Australia. The Australian incident was, naturally, courtesy of Heathrow. There was a silver lining, though. The compensation bought me an almost entirely new summer wardrobe for next to nothing.

So thank you, Heathrow. You may have lost my luggage, wasted my time and briefly separated me from most of my possessions, but at least I looked considerably better afterward.