The Weight: Olympics and YVR

Image by: Glenn Baglo / Vancouver Sun

Next February’s Olympics is expected to put Vancouver International Airport’s baggage-handling process through the wringer. But after last December’s snowstorm debacle, many are wondering if YVR can handle the load.

Some people might think I needed my head examined. But in January of 2008, I applied to work for Swissport Canada Handling Inc., a company that provides third-party baggage-handling services to WestJet and other airlines flying in and out of Vancouver International Airport.

Chucking bags for close to minimum wage, I thought, would give me an insight into a world that airline passengers rarely see – namely what happens to their luggage after it is weighed and labelled at the airport check-in desk. I figured that working for Swissport – a company I had never heard of at the time – would also give me an early look at the challenges one of Canada’s biggest airports will face during the 2010 Games next February.

Already a stop-off point for 18 million passengers and 25 million bags per year, YVR is Canada’s largest gateway for passengers travelling to other destinations, with about 55 per cent of the bags landing in YVR winding up on connecting flights. On peak days during the Games, 80,000 passengers are expected to come through the airport gates – a number that is close to what the airport would typically see during peak tourist season in August, when about 60,000 bags from inbound and outbound passengers flow through the system.

That will put a lot more pressure on the airport’s 1,600 baggage handlers, who were overwhelmed in December 2008 when heavy snowfall forced Air Canada to cancel domestic flights in and out of Vancouver after the aircraft de-icing fluid ran out. From Dec. 23 to 25, flight delays and cancellations stranded hundreds of Christmas travellers, leaving piles of unclaimed luggage in the airport baggage rooms. Some of it was still there weeks after the chaos was over.

“If this happened during the Olympics, they would be in real trouble,” says Todd Haverstock, general chairperson for the western region of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), the union representing airport baggage and maintenance workers. In hindsight, he says, it probably opened a lot of people’s eyes to what officials need to do to prepare for another snowstorm during the 16 days when the Games are on. 

Tossing bags into aircraft holds turned out to be a screaming wake-up call for a muscular system that had become atrophied by years spent doing little more than tapping the keyboard on a reporter’s computer terminal. It was also an entry into a world of dead-end jobs and some dreary mornings spent on bag room assembly lines.

Getting hired wasn’t difficult. Switzerland-based Swissport International Ltd., which operates in 42 countries and posted revenue of $2 billion in 2008, employs 350 people in Vancouver and has grabbed a slice of the local action by focusing exclusively on narrow-body aircraft. It handles about 20 per cent of YVR’s baggage business under contracts with WestJet Airlines Ltd. (about 80 per cent of its business), Continental Airlines, Frontier Airlines, Northwest Airlines and Sunwing Airlines. Its main rivals are Air Canada Ground Handling Services – which handles over 50 per cent of the airport baggage under contracts with parent Air Canada, Air Canada Jazz, Lufthansa, Air New Zealand, Cathay Pacific Airlines, Delta Air Lines and Air China – Servisair Inc. and Transat AT Inc. subsidiary Handlex.

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  • 2010 vancouver games, 
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  • Transportation