Originally Posted by
stephem
I had a bag on this flight. I was led to believe by DL bag agent that there were thousands of bags like mine that just didn’t get loaded before the plane on which the bag’s owner had boarded had to leave. They made it sound like this had been happening day after day for weeks, since early May and that’s why we saw huge piles of bags when we landed weeks earlier in LHR. The story I heard about this flight is that DL consolidated passengers onto other flights to free up one airframe for a luggage-only flight. I wonder how many bags are still there from days/weeks ago? How many more luggage-only flights are they going to need to do to clear the backlog?
My data point: I flew LHR-MSP in mid-June in D1 with one bag checked at the SkyPriority line in the terminal at LHR, SkyPriority tag attached. It arrived as expected on my flight and appeared on the belt near the beginning of my flight's bags. I didn't stick around to get any sense of whether other passengers on the flight didn't receive their bags.
LHR was crowded then and had long lines, including SkyPriority check in and SkyPriority security, but I certainly didn't see any evidence of mounds of luggage sitting around in the terminal.