OREANDA-NEWS. January 16, 2015. Accumulated baggage at the Incheon Airport surpassed 400 million items in 13 years and 9 months after its opening in March 2001.

To celebrate reaching this milestone, a ceremony was held at Incheon Airport's passenger terminal to welcome the passenger carrying the 400 millionth item of baggage. President and CEO of Incheon Airport Park Wan-su presented Mr. Choi Won-jong who flew in from Singapore via Singapore Airlines flight 600 with a golden key.

The amount of baggage handled by Incheon Airport started at around 12.4 million items when the Airport opened in 2001. The volume has grown at an average of 6.3% every year since, hitting 100 million pieces of cumulative baggage in February 2006, 200 million by June 2009, 300 million by June 2012, and finally reaching the remarkable milestone of 400 million, two years and six months later.

With this quantitative expansion, Incheon Airport's Baggage Handling System (BHS) turned out to be as much as 18 times more precise than that of European and American airports, which is an outstanding qualitative growth.

Commonly, precision in baggage handling system is estimated by counting the number of items of baggage that failed to be loaded per 100 thousand. According to the ‘Baggage Report 2014’ by SITA, European airports had an average of 18 and American airports (domestic flights) had an average of 6.4, while Incheon Airport had only one with the error rate of 0.001%.