'Utter carnage' after baggage problems at airport

"Utter carnage" unravelled at Birmingham Airport on Friday, according to one passenger, after the airport experienced an "issue" with its baggage system.

The airport issued an alert at 14:00 BST, warning passengers that there was a problem which was impacting some outbound luggage, but that engineers were on site working as quickly as possible to resolve it.

Russell Griffin, who flew from Birmingham to Ibiza this morning, told the BBC that his luggage, along with many others on the flight, had been left at the airport.

He said: "It has been utter carnage from the point we arrived and I understand it is the same at the moment".

Griffin, from Tamworth, said his Jet2 flight was due to depart at 07:05 BST, but it was delayed for two and a half hours and it left without 70 bags that should have been on the plane.

He said: "We boarded the plane at around 06:35 BST and everything appeared normal, until the pilot made an announcement that bags had not been loaded due to the fact all the carousels were still down inside the airport.

"He read names out of people who had their bags and those who didn't, but, the majority of the people stayed on the plane.

"Due to the fact people had booked with Jet2, they would have potentially lost their money if they'd got off the plane."

He added: "The airport has been catastrophically bad - it put an announcement out in the afternoon, but it knew of the problem in the morning, and they should have told us before we got to the airport."

Griffin told the BBC that the passengers on his flight had to drop their bags off at Zone D instead of Zone A, due to the baggage carousels not working, and he said there "must have been a hundred bags parked there."

He added: "All of the Jet2 flights from this morning would have been affected".

A Birmingham Airport spokesperson said colleagues are "working hard to ensure baggage in terminal is being processed as quickly as possible".

The spokesperson added that "we sincerely apologise" and "those due to travel today should still arrive at the airport in line with airline advice."

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