Kolkata: Inline bag scan for flyers on all but two airlines from Monday

KOLKATA: From Monday afternoon, most flyers travelling out of Kolkata airport will finally be able to deposit their bags directly at airline check-in counters without having to get them X-rayed first. However, those travelling by GoAir and AirAsia India will not be able to avail of the facility till later this year.
For passengers on other domestic airlines and all international carriers, it is one queue less while travelling through Kolkata.Speaking to TOI, Kolkata airport director Kaushik Bhattacharjee said the glitch-free soft launch in the past week had given the airport operator confidence to go ahead with the full-fledged roll-out on Monday. “From Monday afternoon, the online baggage screening system will function 24x7 at four portals in the domestic wing and three in the international. It will save passengers anything between 5 to 20 minutes,” Bhattacharjee said.
While the CTX machines have been scanning the baggage of international travellers in phases for the past six days, live trials began in the domestic wing on Thursday. What was holding back the roll-out was lack of adequate number of certified screeners to check the bags on the go. With more screeners arriving in Kolkata over the weekend, a decision was taken to go ahead with the commissioning on Monday.
“Over the past six days, we commissioned the system, one portal at a time. Simultaneously, we increased the number of shifts to check the preparedness of screeners. Now, we are ready and will go ahead on Monday,” the director explained.
Efforts are on to make portal A, which handles GoAir and AirAsia India flights, to also be ILBS compliant in six months. This portal had to be left out for now as its baggage handling system was supplied by a Spanish firm unlike the rest that was done by German company Siemens. “The software of portal A needs to be updated for it to integrate with the rest,” an airport official explained.
Sources said all three portals in the international wing — F, G and H — have been using the ILBS facility round-the-clock since Saturday. With the screener crunch taken care of following the arrival of those who had been deployed in Chennai, the domestic wing will be commissioned full-time.
Airport officials said portal D, which caters to SpiceJet and Vistara, and portal E, which handles Air India, will start operation from the early hours of Monday. Portals B and C, used by IndiGo, are likely to be commissioned in the afternoon.
“IndiGo will begin operations a little later in the day just to ensure the full commissioning is seamless. There will be a meeting around 10.30am between the airport operator and the airline representatives to discuss feedback from the first shift, following which IndiGo is likely to kick off ILBS operation in the domestic section from noon,” said an airport official.
Airline representatives said they were satisfied with the soft launch and phased commissioning. “We were expecting the reject baggage count to be lot higher than it has turned out to be. So far, it has worked perfectly. We have also trained our staff who are reminding passengers about the hassle they might face if they leave a power bank in the checked-in bag. So far, the transition has been seamless,” said an IndiGo official.
Officials of other airlines, too, agreed the roll-out has been hitch-free.
The ILBS facility comes seven years after the integrated terminal was inaugurated. Most modern airports across the world have the facility. Mumbai and Delhi, along with Bengaluru and Hyderabad, got ILBS nearly a decade ago.