As baggage operations grow more complex and integrated with overall airport performance, safety in these environments is becoming a more visible concern to airport leaders. Tara Riggs, who brings over a decade of experience in baggage handling operations, has spent much of her career working inside these pressure-cooker environments. Now leading A-SAFE’s airport safety efforts, she focuses on how infrastructure and design decisions can better support operations.
Why should leaders in the airport industry be paying closer attention to safety risks in baggage handling areas right now?
“There’s a growing responsibility to support airports that are handling more volume with increasingly complex operations. Baggage areas are no longer static environments – they’re evoking very fast with more equipment, tighter timelines, and more pressure on throughput. What we are seeing is that these spaces can become points of friction if they’re not designed to handle that complexity. For aviation leaders, it’s less about isolated incidents and more about ensuring long-term stability.”
How are rising passenger volumes and terminal modernization projects changing the risk profile in these environments?
“As airports expand and modernize, they are layering new systems into environments that weren’t always designed for that level of activity. You’re seeing more overlap between vehicle traffic, personnel, and infrastructure, often within the same constrained footprint. At one of Europe’s busiest regional hubs, Malpensa Airport, for example: the reopening of their terminal 2 forced the airport to rethink how passengers could move safely through active apron areas, leading to the installation of protected pedestrian pathways that could handle both operations and changing gate configurations. I think that was a good example of how modernization can reshape your risk profile.”
Where do airports most commonly underestimate the operational impact of minor vehicle collisions and infrastructure strikes?
“The biggest blind spots tend to be in high-traffic, behind-the-scenes-areas like baggage halls, service coordinators, and airside zones where ground support vehicles are constantly moving. In those environments, low-speed impacts can appear routine but can have broader consequences than expected. In our experience, a small hit to a conveyor, column, or barrier can trigger equipment checks and temporary shutdowns that reduce throughput. Over time, those disruptions add up, especially in environments where operations are tightly scheduled.”
As airports invest in automation, what steps should they take to keep baggage areas safe and efficient at the same time?
“The key is making sure the physical environment keeps pace with the technology being introduced – and this comes down to material science. Steel barriers come with extended damage and downtime that don’t play well with automated machines, where we have seen that polymer is much lower maintenance and more energy absorbent. We have seen similar challenges in warehouses and smart factories, where those levels of robotics require an entirely different infrastructure to support it, challenging the designers. For airports, it’s about taking that same approach.”
Why should traffic segregation and impact protection be viewed as part of long-term airport infrastructure planning rather than short-term fixes?
“Because once an airport starts growing, those pressure points do not sit isolated for long. Areas with mixed traffic tend to become more vulnerable over time if the layout was not built to manage that flow. Brussel’s airport is a good example: repeated vehicle impacts were causing damage to two mission-critical baggage conveyors, making it clear that it was not a maintenance issue, but an infrastructure one. By putting in more flexible impact protection, the airport was able to better protect key assets and realize a noticeable ROI within the year.”
What should airport operators and aviation authorities prioritize in 2026 to make baggage handling systems more resilient?
“Baggage handling may be out of sight for most passengers, but for airports it is becoming one of the most operationally complex areas of the terminal environment. And in spaces like that, short term fixes may solve the immediate problem, but they rarely solve the pattern behind it. In 2026, the priority should be the environment itself – how the space is designed, how the traffic moves through it, whether the layout can handle pressure without creatine bottlenecks. That resilience should be measured through reduced downtime and time directly back to ROI. Put simply, operators will start reexamining airports for smarter spaces, not just systems.”
