The number of lost or delayed bags should be halved with the introduction of the largest baggage handling system in Europe at Terminal 5, British Airways pledged yesterday.

The computer-controlled system has 11 miles of conveyor belts capable of handling 12,000 bags an hour. It has a separate fast-track network for late bags, with “destination-coded” trolleys running on aluminium rails at 23mph.

BA has the second-worst record among European airlines for losing bags. Last year, it lost 26.5 bags for every 1,000 passengers. David Noyes, its director of customer service, said that the airline was aiming for a 50 per cent reduction in lost or delayed bags by the end of the first year of operations at T5.

He said that having 92 per cent of BA flights operating from the same terminal would reduce the number of bags which missed their connections. At present, many bags belonging to BA passengers are delayed while being transferred between T1 and T4.

BAA admitted that the operation of the baggage system was the key factor in determining whether T5 was a success. New terminals are often plagued by flaws in baggage systems.

The new system has a special storage area for bags that are checked in earlier than the standard two to three hours before departure. These bags clog up existing systems because they arrive too early at loading areas.

They will be automatically guided to racks in the terminal’s basement, where high-speed cranes will place them in one of 3,800 slots and remove them when the flight is ready to be loaded.

The baggage system has been designed in two halves that can operate independently of each other should one break down. It has been operating for 18 months in test mode with thousands of dummy bags.

Once checked in, each bag is automatically checked for height and length by a scanner before being tipped on its side into the centre of the conveyor belt. The bag is then security-screened and, depending on the time to departure, sent on one of three routes: to the early bag store, the normal slow-moving belt or the fast-track system.

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