Indeed. In almost all cases, it takes longer for a bag to move between planes than it does for a human to move between planes.
Or, for that matter, to get back onto the same plane. A couple of years ago, I was flying from Montreal to Vancouver, via Edmonton, with only 30 minutes scheduled to get between flights. It turned out that the same plane was being used for both the Montreal-Edmonton and the Edmonton-Vancouver flights; I made the connection, but my suitcase didn't -- it was taken off the plane along with all the others, went into the airport's baggage routing system, and didn't make it through in time to get back onto the plane.
I recently had the opposite experience. I was flying from BWI to MEM via Charlotte (which is what I get for buying tickets last minute.) MEM->CTL was delayed somewhat, leaving me with approximately 2 minutes to get from one terminal to another far away terminal.
I naturally didn't make the flight. While they were more than happy to accomodate me and get me onto the next CTL->BWI flight, I was worried about what was going to happen to my luggage, though it somehow beat me there.
"It turned out that the same plane was being used for both the Montreal-Edmonton and the Edmonton-Vancouver flights; I made the connection, but my suitcase didn't -- it was taken off the plane along with all the others, went into the airport's baggage routing system, and didn't make it through in time to get back onto the plane."
I can understand why they wouldn't bother optimizing such a rare special case. There are probably a long chain of procedures that would have to be made more complex to accomodate this.
Yet another case of choosing general scalability over local performance ;)
Indeed. In almost all cases, it takes longer for a bag to move between planes than it does for a human to move between planes.
Or, for that matter, to get back onto the same plane. A couple of years ago, I was flying from Montreal to Vancouver, via Edmonton, with only 30 minutes scheduled to get between flights. It turned out that the same plane was being used for both the Montreal-Edmonton and the Edmonton-Vancouver flights; I made the connection, but my suitcase didn't -- it was taken off the plane along with all the others, went into the airport's baggage routing system, and didn't make it through in time to get back onto the plane.