Are Brussels Airlines and Brussels Airport loosing it?

I have written in the past about the curious happenings that seem to affect Brussels Airlines’ flights from Vienna. You can read about them here and here. Last Friday however I got proof that flights TO Vienna can also be jinxed… Sadly, the event I am about to relate to you also shows that collaborative decision making (CDM) as practiced to-day in Brussels needs to be improved substantially.
SN runs a very convenient service to Vienna, leaving Brussels at 0705 and arriving in the Austrian capital shortly after 0830. With the new train connection at the airport you can reach most meeting locations for a comfortable 1000 start.

I was at Brussels airport early last Friday, 15 April because exceptionally I was planning to entrust my little trolley bag to the care of the “system”. As you will see, this was an exceptionally bad idea. Having checked in at home, baggage drop-off was a breeze and in no time at all I was through security and on my way up to the gate area.
Brussels Airport is one of those places where they use the totally idiotic and counter- productive idea of posting the gate numbers at the last possible moment believing that leaving passengers clueless about the gate would generate more revenue at the shops… In fact they are only “punishing” those who check in at home and who do not have bags to drop off since they will indeed not learn the gate number until the airport decides to disclose this closely guarded secret; all others get the gate number scribbled on their boarding pass by the helpful airlines (who probably hate this selfish attitude of the airports as much as I do).
This morning I was among those happy souls “in the know” and I walked straight to the gate, casting a sad eye at the group of imptient passengers milling around in front of (and NOT inside) the bar waiting for their gate to be posted. At the gate itself a sad sight greeted me. There was no aircraft at the other end of the air-bridge.

Now this is not normally the sign of a problem during the day, after all a 737 or 320 can be turned around in under 30 minutes and with aircraft doing several rotations every day, you don’t expect them to loiter at the gate longer than is absolutely essential. But at 0615 in the morning an empty air-bridge drooping forlornly on the ramp can be bad news indeed. And so it was on this sunny Friday morning. The aircraft for its first rotation was simply not there…
We were approaching the boarding time when they announced a delay of one hour… OOOps! The monitor screen above the head of the gate agent also informed the unhappy crowd that there was a gate change. This was never mentioned in the verbal announcement and most of the people rushed off to get their breakfast voucher… I was not interested in the dried out crap they sell in those stores and went to the “new” gate. This meant a trek of one level down to the gates served by buses for aircraft parked away from the terminal.
Those more interested in breakfast then collaborative decision making in Brussels did miss one of the star performances though. The monitor screen above the new gate informed me sweetly that there was a gate change… back up again to arrive at the new-new gate which was in fact the gate right next to the original one! But this was not the end of the story.
We pushed back a bit more than two hours late but at least we were on our way. I guess none of us thought about our baggage or the big empty hold just below our feet…
Once in Vienna, we waited patiently at the carousel for our bags to appear. The belt was moving, the monitor said these were the bags from the SN Brussels flight so we should have been happy. Except for one thing: there were no bags!
After a while one of the more adventurous fellow passengers went to the lost and found office to enquire what was happening.
Oh, did we not know? The bags were coming at six tonight…
Apparently two hours were not enough for Brussels airport to get the bags of a 737-load of passengers from the original stand to the one right next to it!
May be they just did not know where the bags should go… something for the Brussels CDM team to think about!
Brussels Airlines (a Lufthansa subsidiary) is not a bad airline to fly though their enthusiastic “little airline that could” air has all but disappeared when big brother LH took over. All the problems I described in connection with those Vienna flights were traceable back to poor cooperation between the partners concerned. CDM was invented to take care of that exact problem. Both Brussels and Vienna are so called CDM airports but apparently they are that only on paper. Our adventures all happened on days with otherwise normal operations… I shudder to think what these airports would be capable of producing in terms of poor performance when the going got really hard.
Folks get your act together!