Sometimes when I’m in an airport, waiting in a line, I wonder if I’m part of some giant psychological experiment. You think you have it all together, at least you try because of the cameras and the no-fly list, but then, then a snowstorm of historical proportions hits the city you must depart from.
Me, a tourist from Los Angeles, forgets winter happens anywhere else. I mean I brought sandals for Puglia and left my Uggs at home for a trip to Europe that ended during the first few days of December in Munich, a city near the Alps, a city that knows snow. Sometime in the afternoon, when the snow began rising like a white cake baking in an oven, I said, “That’s a lot of snow!”
After the storm was over, the city had been buried in 44 cm of the white stuff. The most snow recorded on any day in December in Munich in history.
“It will be gone by Christmas,” my gracious hosts said.
The snow blanketed the city with a kind of quiet, a kind of peace that makes you feel as if the world has stopped. It had. The city trams. The cross country trains. The cars. The dogs loved it.
So we walked. I kept thinking about what they say about dancing – don’t look at your feet. But I couldn’t stop staring at the ground to find the least precarious spot to place my next step.
When someone fell in front of us, my friend, a German physician, looked at his watch and predicted when orthopedic cases would begin to file into his ER. That was the day we decided to go out and purchase five German made porcelain cups, gifts to be sent home with me for my family.
“Please,” I said, “don’t jinx me.”
Then the temperature dropped to -11C. The snow was going nowhere. And yet, the possibility that my flight out of the city after the weekend could be canceled never entered my mind. Packed my bag Sunday night for my flight out Monday morning.
My friend offered to drive me early, the kind of early when it’s still dark, to the airport on his way to work. Since the two train lines out to the airport were running, I opted for a couple hours of extra sleep and the train to catch my flight scheduled for departure at noon. One last check on my flight status – the flight was good to go.
Easy.
The instant I stepped into the airport, I realized my mistake. Any notion of the years of thought that went into designing a modern, easy to navigate airport was erased. Lines of people snaked around the airport at every check point.
I thought, If I’d gotten out of bed early, I would already be through all of this.
All I was armed with was my boarding pass and two fresh baked breze (German pretzels). I got in line for the self-baggage drop-off. Scanning and tagging your bag is easy enough, fun even, unless your bag weighs in above 23 kg. The machine will reject it. Frantic people were kneeling on the floor next to their open bags, removing anything they could to force the system to take their bag. Some abandoned the self-baggage drop-off and headed over to wait in line all over again at the drop-off with a Lufthansa agent.
I walked up to a free kiosk, and poof, the screen disappeared. All the machines went down, and ding, I got it, I might not make my flight. A Lufthansa attendant rescued us and rebooted the machines. My bag registered as less than 23 kg, and I blew it a kiss good bye.
I headed to the next line, boarding pass control, also automated. I made it through the switchbacks, which from a distance degenerated into a disorganized mass of humanity. Somewhere in the TSA line, I gave it up to fate as to whether or not I would make my flight. Some people were cutting in or worse, missing their cue to move forward. Finally, passport control, where a real person stamped my passport.
I was now free, free to determine how fast or slow I would run to my gate. A quick ride on a shuttle train, at the bottom of a staircase/escalator the length of the height of a small building, and back up again. I made it to my gate with 30 minutes to spare.
My plane, my plane was not at the gate.
Lufthansa still sent fresh updates every half hour. I was suspect when each new update predicted departure in the next 30 minutes even though the plane was not at the gate. My friends were at home and work, tracking my flight status online, maybe secretly hoping my flight would be canceled so I could have some bonus days with them. But I’d already been there almost a week and I wanted them to stay my friends.
Around 14:30 the plane pulled up to the gate, with about three inches of snow and icicles covering the wings and the top of the A380. The plane looked like it had been dug out of a snow drift. It was. “The wheels were frozen to the ground,” they later told us.
“Take some snow to LA,” one of my friends said.
“The latest and greatest in aviation design, price tag close to $1 billion, weighing in at 600 metric tons with over 300,000 pounds of thrust, and the wheels froze to the ground?” my brother in LA texted.
That’s a lot of de-icing was all I could think. With sunset approaching and the dip in temperatures coincident with nightfall, the chances for take-off grew ever slimmer.
Still we waited. Never mind when the crowd of passengers at the gate headed for John F. Kennedy in New York City howled at the announcement that their flight was canceled. We passengers headed to LA, sat quietly. Even when Lufthansa announced another delay for the repair of a technical issue.
Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock.
Meanwhile, Lufthansa gifted each passenger a voucher of 10 euros to spend on food and drink at the airport. Limited options at the single cart with a refrigerator behind it and a few hundred restless adults and children. The only reason to stand in that line would be the possibility of snagging a beer. You could break the passport control at the gate and go out, but there’s that unjustified feeling that you should hang around close by in case you miss your flight.
At some time around 16:00 in the afternoon, four hours after our flight was supposed to leave, we boarded the plane. And then? And then we sat. The pilot came on and said, “We have equipment that needs to be replaced.” I looked out the window at the dimming light. In airplane speak, we are putting off canceling the flight until we can officially cancel the flight.
“One of the two units is here. We are waiting for the second one.” More airplane speak.
Hmmm, I thought, more waiting. The next problem would be time, overtime for the flight crew which is against regulations. What a farce to let us believe otherwise.
Yep, the pilot came on a few minutes later and announced the flight was canceled due to the duration of the work time for the flight crew. We disembarked.
Within a few minutes, I rebooked my flight. I first considered flying out the next day, but I could not commit to repeating the grueling journey out to and through the airport in less than 12 hours. I wasn’t in a hurry anyway. I booked for two days later, which turned out to be an odd moment of premonition. A few minutes later, one of the agents announced, “The airport isn’t opening until noon tomorrow.”
How is that going to work for a flight scheduled to leave at noon?, I thought.
Once I rebooked, I received an email confirming that my suitcase had been dropped off for my flight. That meant I was going back to the city without it. Good, I wouldn’t have to lug it back. But only then did I began to wonder where bags go after they disappear into the black hole of the luggage system.
Like Ground Hog Day, I retraced my steps two days later on a Wednesday, without taking the sheets off my bed this time, in my same clothes. We bought four “breze” at the bakery on the way to the train. Everything was the same, including the mass of people at the airport. Or maybe it was even worse. The only difference was while I was able to check in online the night before, the system didn’t issue my boarding pass.
I knew the layout of the Munich airport now. I headed to the self-service kiosk at the airport to get my boarding pass, but the kiosk also rejected my request. The Lufthansa representative told me I had to go to full service check-in for economy passengers. I looked at the line. She had to be kidding. Three other people gave me the same possibly rehearsed uninformed I don’t know how to help you line. I broke.
Only a few passengers were waiting at the priority first class line. I ditched the line and headed straight for an agent at a corner station in apparent casual conversation with someone who didn’t look like a passenger.
The agent snapped, “Excuse me, I’m talking to someone.”
I looked at the other woman and asked, “Is she a passenger?”
She wasn’t. Can you not see what’s going on around you two? I thought. Focus ladies, focus.
The agent issued me my boarding card, an activity that took her all of two minutes, and told me I had been tagged for a special security check. After a month of travel, I had passed through security in four different airports, three times already in Munich, and once just two days ago. The first step in this special security check was to show my passport to an agent before receiving my boarding pass.
I headed off diving into the mass of people at the security checkpoints for a second time in 48 hours. I left it up to fate again as to whether I would make it to my flight on time. Boarding card check. TSA check. Explosives detection check. Passport control. Down to the shuttle train. Up again. Passport control at the gate. A second TSA check at the gate. This time, computer out, liquids out, shoes off. One final explosives detection check.
This time a plane awaited me at the gate. A plane without snow or icicles on the wings.
My friends, and even friends of my friends, kept a close eye on the status of my flight.
The temperatures had stayed above zero for a couple days, melting enough of the snow. LH 452 took off, an hour late, and I arrived at LAX about five movies later (wow is all I can say, if our air force does what Tom Cruises’s Maverick does in Top Gun). My bag did not. I thought back to the conversation I had on the shuttle train to the remote terminal in Munich with a Lufthansa employee.
“Do you know if our luggage from our canceled flights will make it on board with us?”
“We don’t know,” he said.
Why I needed to hear his non-answer, I didn’t know. To be fair, their priority was delivering us to our destinations safely. At LAX, the Lufthansa representative at the baggage claim had a computer printout of the passengers arriving without their bags. A long list. Maybe most of the passengers. She knew before the flight took off. I submitted the delayed/lost baggage report online, and after receiving a confirmation email with a reference number, I left.
“Tomorrow, you’ll have your bag tomorrow,” the Lufthansa bot, er…representative, said.
I didn’t believe that. I thought maybe not tomorrow, but the next day.
The one travel savvy thing I did on the trip was put an AirTag in my luggage. Or maybe it was another form of torture. I put it into my bag after my friends in Munich told me that they lost a piece of baggage on just a short trip to the UK. At home, I clicked on the Find My app on my iPhone and the baggage icon appeared over a building on the premises of the Munich airport with the time it was recorded. It wasn’t at some other local address, or more importantly, some other country.
The next day came and went. And the one after that. I fell into a routine of checking in on the app around midnight here (the beginning of the work day in Munich) and in the mornings when I woke up (the end of the work day there). While my bag hadn’t moved onto a plane, it looked like it was ping-ponging between two buildings at the airport. My explanation was it was going through some cycles of storage and security before loading onto the daily LH 452 flight direct from Munich to LAX.
After five days, my sister called. I sent her the photos I was taking from my Find My app.
She said, “It looks like it’s on some guy’s truck, but he doesn’t know it. And it’s detected either when that guy drives his vehicle in the morning and the evening or when it’s close to either of those buildings.”
This simple idea made sense. The bag would leave one of the buildings in the morning and then return in the evening and stay there overnight. And it could have explained why I didn’t have my bag yet – the bag was hidden on some vehicle.
If only I could get that guy’s cell number, we joked. Or maybe we just didn’t understand how AirTags work.
Every two days, I continued to receive a status email that my bag still wasn’t in the system. I knew more about my bag from 6,000 miles away than Lufthansa did.
I called the Munich airport, which connected me to a call center somewhere in Asia, thinking the AirTag information might help the baggage handlers locate my bag.
“We don’t use AirTag information,” said the woman on the other end of the line.
“Really, why not? Can you not at least use that there is an AirTag?” I said.
She then claimed there was no delayed baggage report associated with my name or tag number.
“But how could I have a delayed baggage reference number if no report has been submitted?” I asked. She hung up on me.
I dialed the number again. The next agent added the AirTag information to the report. It only made me, and maybe the call center agent, feel like we were doing something. I didn’t believe any of the details in the report were used to locate the bag. The report just linked a delayed/missing bag to me and my contact details.
I thought making a physical appearance at the Lufthansa counter at LAX might trigger some activity. But it was just another form of punishment. The two women at the ticket counter that day were not interested in helping me problem solve. I don’t know how they train people in customer service to deflect, but these two were good at it.
“It’s not our problem. It’s Munich’s problem,” the manager told me. Lufthansa has only two flights a day on their equipment from LAX to Germany. These two women seemed to have very little knowledge of the situation in Munich. Just pass the customer on, was the message I got. They did, to the lost baggage department two floors down. My bag wasn’t lost. I knew where it was. I just needed someone to contact in the Munich airport. That’s all I was asking for.
Ten days into the delayed baggage, when I phoned the call center, the man on the line said, “Good thing, your baggage has been found.”
“Yay!” I screamed.
“It was supposed to be on flight LH 1106 yesterday. Frankfurt to Salzburg.”
“Hold it,” I said, hearing the scratch across the vinyl record in my head. “That can’t be right. I know my bag is in Munich.”
After 14 days, I gave up.
I still phoned the call center, as a form of entertainment. Every other day, a man called Jaden answered and would say, “I can’t hear you.” Then he’d hang up. I’d call back and someone else might say, “The system is down.”
Another day the agent told me I hadn’t submitted a claim for the contents of my bag. My bag wasn’t lost and I didn’t want to make a claim. Another deflection, as if the contents of my bag would have anything to do with breaking my bag out of the warehouse and loading it onto a plane headed to the USA. But within 36 hours of submitting that claim, I received an email from Lufthansa, telling me they couldn’t reimburse me for my bag. Sometimes they could be efficient.
My story spread among friends on both sides of the Atlantic.
A German acquaintance in the USA told me, “Once my bag went all the way to Australia on Lufthansa, but after 14 days I got it back. You just have to be patient.”
On Facebook, the Munich Airport told me to contact my airline, while the airline never bothered to reply to my comments on their page. The situation had really been a system-wide failure. I figured the airport would be as concerned about passengers getting their bags back as the individual airlines.
Reading the comments from other passengers on different Facebook pages triggered new fears in me that I would never get my bag back. One passenger had even paid to go back to Munich, only to be told that Lufthansa was not employing people to sort the baggage, and it may or may not be returned at the discretion of the airline. You pay extra to check your bag, and it’s at their discretion to return it to you?
I had better luck emailing a grounds operator.
“Be patient,” she wrote. “We have a high amount of lost baggage cases now.”
I bet.
The day after my friend in Munich visited the airport a second time, I received an email from the baggage tracking system, that my bag was arriving on flight LH 452 from Munich to Los Angeles the next day. My bag had been sprung.
I went to the airport an hour before the flight was supposed to land. I wanted to rescue the bag before it went out on a truck for delivery which wouldn’t be until sometime the next day. I wasn’t hanging around alone on Christmas to wait for it. The man guarding the door to the delayed or lost baggage area told me another 4 or 5 hours. I didn’t believe him.
“Customs has to x-ray the bag, and that takes time,” he said. “Several hours.”
Once the flight landed, my brother’s first question was, “Did you check your AirTag?”
I laughed. I hadn’t. There it was, right outside the international terminal. It was close.
I sat down outside the lost and found, read my book, talked on the phone, and watched passengers arrive on other flights. After two hours, I went back to the guard at the door and asked if I could find out what the status of my bag was. He let me in.
“Not here yet,” the agent behind the counter said.
After another hour, I asked, “Do they know people are waiting here?”
Finally a giant load of bags appeared, and then several more.
“There, that one, I see my bag!” My humble evergreen 15-year old Rimowa bag I could see from the doorway. I was going to get my Christmas. After confirming with one of the baggage handlers that the bag belonged to me, I left with it.
Epilogue
I’m convinced it was my German friend who went to the Munich airport – twice – and complained that got my bag purged from the luggage black hole. I’d read the airlines sell or even burn bags that might be too costly for them to find and return.
My brother asked him, “What did you say to the guy there?”
My friend, a surgeon, said, “One day you’re gonna be sick and it’s gonna be me who fixes you.”
I got to show up at Christmas with the Steiff teddy bear from my German friends for my toddler niece, and gifts of chocolate for the rest of my family. I got back my custom made shoes, and my Italian sandals, for my impossible to fit feet, and all the travel stuff I’ve collected over the years.
All the places I’ve been and my bag didn’t make it on a direct flight from a big city in Europe to another big city in the USA. Foiled by a snowstorm. Sorted out by humans.
And yes, today I’m a little less enamored of automated call systems.
Books…
Norwegian Lessons in Indonesia (2023)
An Accidental Artist: Discovering Creativity through Scuba Diving (2018)
Art for sale at AnemoneWatch on Square
Janice Nigro 
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