‘CREATIVE SOLUTION’

Delta Fills Wide-Body Jet With 1,000 Lost Bags From Heathrow

The rescue operation involved using an Airbus A330 with no passengers aboard “to accelerate movement of delayed bags.”

Roughly 1,000 pieces of stranded luggage were repatriated back to the U.S. after Delta Air Lines filled an empty wide-body jet with the bags and flew them from London to Detroit. The “creative solution,” as the airline called it on Wednesday, came in response to a disordered travel season, particularly at London’s Heathrow Airport, where understaffing, flight cancellations, and travel delays have resulted in mountains of abandoned bags, as documented on social media. The Airbus A330-200 tasked with the luggage transport was chartered out of Heathrow after its regularly scheduled July 11 flight was canceled, Bloomberg News reported. The travelers booked onto that flight were shifted onto other planes, according to the airline. The unusual journey was disclosed by Delta’s chief executive on a recent quarterly earnings call, who blamed “operational issues” for the large-scale separation of customers from their bags.