we all know the drill arrive at the desk tag your bag print your boarding pass and head through security finally you make it through get the obligatory super sized chocolate bar and dutyfree and then time to find the gate board the plane and get ready for takeoff that's all there is to it it's all very familiar but behind the scenes there's a hidden world of [Music] complexity take your suitcase once you've checked in your bag sets out on its own long and secret Journey before eventually joining you on board here in Dubai they handle enormous
volumes of luggage in just 3 hours during the morning rush they process around 50,000 bags stacked like this they'd reach as high as Dubai's Burge Khalifa the tallest building in the world annually the airport handles a staggering 57 million items that's equivalent to 1,100 Burge [Music] khalifas and it's all got to be whisked through the [Music] airport every bag must get to the right plane at exactly the right time to make sure that happens each indiv visual bag needs one of these The Humble bag tag so when your baggage tag which we've all seen obviously
you've got things like your name and then here we've got the dxb which is a three-digit code for the airport that you're heading to but the really important thing is this mysterious 10 digigit number along the bottom this is like your bag's passport number if you like so the digits identify the airline your particular bag's ID number and then the a special message digit which identifies the priority of the bag or any other information they need to know high priority low priority that kind of thing this code is part of the universal language of Aviation
an international system that knows no borders and it determines exactly what will happen to your suitcase after [Music] checkin 25 M beneath the airport lies a bizarre Subterranean World a sprawling 85m highspeed Railway Network costing around 500 million pounds to build this is the world's biggest luggage system this place is absolutely enormous everywhere you go there are just miles and miles of these conveyor belts these trays that carry the suitcases moving along it's really weird it's like some kind of postapocalyptic Fairground ride but the strange thing is you don't see any human beings it's completely
automated it's like the robots have taken over after checkin your bag is spat onto a yellow tray each tray has been chipped with a unique ID and a computer tracks which bag has landed in which tray so each tray is specific for each bag it is yeah so instead of tracking that bag we track you track a tray instead I see and that tray has an ID which allows us to track it 100% the human being tasked with keeping an eye over this vast system is baggage manager gr Pollock what we have around various points
in the bager system are what you see here is some read stations this thing here this thing here this sensor will pick up the information from the train so the train knows where it's going it will tell this part of the bag assistant and here I am please send me to this location and then the bagage system will then divert it to the necessary output point the computerized brain of the luggage system plots every inch of your bag's Journey to the aircraft if your flight's leaving within an hour the computer sends your baggage straight to
the Loading area but for those of us with better timekeeping our bags end up here the early baggage storage system if you've checked in a little bit too early what happens is the bags will wait here and then as soon as it's time for them to to make the journey to the aircraft a little red robot shuttle will whiz along here pick up the tray and put it on the the conveyor belt system and then away it goes look there goes a robot the sheer volume of baggage moving through here is breathtaking it simply can't
be allowed to fail so it's monitored constantly from the control room there are more people working here than on the entire length of the conveyor system over there 86 and 374 you need to clear it fast please if it's taking time let me know please can you just explain a little bit about how this works because it looks like a full-on something you might find in a railway Network it looks incredibly complicated basically you can see right now red yellow and green uh green shows the system is normal basically the green color so red shows
a fault and there's also yellow as well so what is yellow yellow yellow yellow is basically a queuing where the bags weits it's basically like a traffic light green good yellow might have a problem red is like ah yeah
