I am an airport baggage handler and this is a day in my life

Have you ever wondered what it takes to get your airplane luggage from A to B in one piece?

Well, according to a baggage handler, hard work goes on behind the scenes, with a very early start, lots of walking and cold temperatures being some of the efforts.

Rachel Bacha of Idaho works for Delta Air Lines as a ramp agent – also known as a baggage handler – and in a series of TikToks she reveals what her typical days look like, including the 2:35 a.m. start.

Some of her days can be 14 hours long, but most of the time she works between 4am and 12am.

In a video, she explains that after waking up at 4 a.m. for four years, she learned some techniques to make sure she doesn’t fall asleep again.

First, she says, “When I hear my alarm clock, I get out of bed. I don’t hit snooze once. It sucks now, but it’s gonna suck in five minutes.”

Another of her crafty tricks is to always have something to look forward to.

This might include trying a new coffee pod or rustling up her favorite breakfast, which consists of sliced ​​banana and peanut butter on toast, sprinkled with cinnamon.

‘[It’s] just little, simple things, so when you wake up you have something to look forward to,” explains Rachel.

After leaving home, the avid traveler usually goes to work at 3:50 am.

Once she puts on a safety vest, she goes to work in the baggage area, where “all the bags go after you check them in for your flight.”

In the baggage area, there is a conveyor belt that the baggage passes through, with ramp agents loading it onto small trucks or carts.

Before the luggage arrives, Rachel says she’s getting the carts ready and in position.

She also checks the computer ‘to see how many passengers there are, because then I can properly estimate how many bags I can expect’.

Once all the carts are full – usually about 35 minutes until departure – someone will come to the baggage area to remove the baggage carts.

When she has time, Rachel says she’ll take the carts out to load the plane and then get ready for the next flight.

She muses, “For the most part, there’s a fairly steady stream of bags coming onto the belt.

“From 4 a.m. to 6 a.m., I can expect anywhere from 200 to 250 bags, depending on whether it’s a heavy travel day or not.”

In addition to standard suitcases, Rachel must ensure that oversized luggage including bicycles, strollers, surfboards, walking sticks [and] golf bags’ are carefully transferred to the correct aircraft.

From about 6:30am to 9:30am she says “there are only two small flights going out so it’s a bit slower in the bag room.”

During this time, she works on her crochet project and gets her snacks and breakfast from the break room.

After a pause, she will get her carts ready for the next flights and then “pretty much from here for the rest of the day, it’s pretty busy in the bag room.”

Rachel reveals that she usually clocks 15,000 to 16,000 steps per shift in the luggage compartment.

Other tasks she performs as part of her job include de-icing the planes, shunting the plane, and pushing the planes back.

Although Rachel says disaster agent shifts seem long, “they actually go by so quickly.”

However, she adds that they still leave her “pretty exhausted.”