Travel: ARCH to the Rescue

A popular gag of the wondrous jet age is "Breakfast in Berlin, lunch in London, dinner in Detroit—and baggage in Bombay."

At any given moment, the airlines estimate, some 2,500 pieces of U.S. luggage are somewhere they shouldn't be (a total the U.S. airlines consider not unreasonable in view of the 100 million items they handle each year). Nothing much, apparently, can be done to stop losing them, but this month 20 American airlines began to do something about finding them faster.

Into operation went ARCH—which stands for Airline Baggage Recovery Clearing House.

Any bag that is unclaimed for three days is opened—an invasion of privacy which may be justified by the number of suitcases that look identical—and its contents are described by Teletype to ARCH headquarters in Chicago. The information is coded according to a standard format that assigns a number to each of the 89 most frequently carried articles: 12 is food, 27 is suspenders, 40 is sneakers. The fuming passenger is read a list of the articles and asked which of them his luggage contained. From there on, it is simply a question of matching up punch cards. Getting bag back to owner is up to the airline.