Just working out how many pairs of socks you need when you’re off to the Seychelles, Milan or Timbuktu is a struggle in itself. The transfers also take it out of you. Be it trekking for miles at Frankfurt or misreading signs at Tokyo’s Narita airport. At long last you’re at the conveyor, waiting for that precious bag. Suitcase after suitcase rolls up, people yank them off the belt, but yours is nowhere to be seen. Damnation.

Maybe you feel you’d want to do something about this. Not just to rescue your own bag, but to improve or perhaps even change the whole system of baggage handling. Statistics reveal that 21.6 million bags were, as they put it, mishandled in 2016. Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? Then again more than four billion bits of baggage were handled by airports in 2017. So, whichever way you look at it, baggage handling is a major operation.