Originally Posted by
jk156
Now I'm not particularly bothered by this - these things happen and I'd always have a couple of days' worth of fresh clothes and essentials in hand luggage - but I'm just curious as to how the screw up of sending them via DXB happened. Was this a simply automated thing, with the computer dumbly choosing the only "LHR-MEL" flight available given that MEL was the bags' ultimate destination? Or was this a human mishandle by BA or HAL?
For obvious reasons I don't know any details, but AIUI if a bag misses a passenger's flight, there is a bit of work that needs to be done before the bag can fly again. So (unlike a piece of misconnected self-loading cargo) it is not quite as simple as putting it onto the next flight that the bag could theoretically make.
What I have sometimes wondered is whether the onward routing is only decided after the bags have completed the further screening processes at the missed connection point - that could account for why the selected routing for this bag did not start from LHR until about 15 hours later.