From time to time, spectacular events call attention to airport luggage theft — as when a New York baggage handler lifted $500,000 in jewels from a checked bag belonging to Sarah Ferguson, the duchess of York, in 1995, or the weekend arrests of 11 people in connection with a series of larcenies at Bradley International Airport.

 

But pilfered or stolen bags are not a new or rare phenomenon, even if official reports of crimes are few compared with the billions of people and bags that move through America's airports.

 

Luggage theft is reported to airlines or federal authorities almost every day, according to industry experts and data from the federal Transportation Security Administration.

 

"It's a big problem and it always has been," said Robert Mann, an airline consultant on Long Island who previously worked for several large U.S. carriers and has been in charge of authorizing loss and damage claims.

 

So far, however, it's a problem that airlines and airports have not seen fit to address aggressively.

 

There is no central database for formal reports of pilfered luggage, according to commercial aviation industry sources, including airports, airline representatives and government agencies, and comprehensive national data apparently do not exist. Typically, passengers who bother to report suspected thefts file their claims with individual airlines, which rarely share the data, or with the TSA, which has not yet updated its figures beyond mid-2008.

 

For the federal fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 2008, the TSA received about 17,500 claims for lost, damaged or stolen items, a spokeswoman said Tuesday. The agency paid out a total of $803,875.97 to settle claims, an amount that Mann said a single small airline might pay in a year.

 

A Courant analysis of TSA data provided for the period from 2002 to mid-2008 shows that the agency processed 49,132 claims for passenger loss or theft for which specific airports were cited. Of those, 271 were associated with Bradley.

 

In that time frame, billions of passengers traveled through American airports and tens of millions through Bradley.

 

Several factors minimize the number of complaints, said David Stempler, president of the Air Travelers Association, an advocacy group in Maryland. For one, victims usually don't notice a loss until they have left the airport, he said. Or they doubt their ability to prove a suspected theft.

 

"People don't realize the loss until they're at home," he said.

 

Members of the alleged larceny ring at Bradley said that their thefts began in 2006 or thereabouts, police said. Most of those arrested worked for Delta Global Services, a Delta Air Lines subsidiary that handles baggage. Some worked for the airline itself. More arrests are expected. Delta said that its employees among the group have been fired.

 

Delta declined Tuesday to say how many loss claims that passengers had filed with it in 2008, nationwide or at Bradley, which is in Windsor Locks.

 

"Delta will review the findings of the investigation closely and will look to make any adjustments necessary to ensure that the items passengers entrust us with at Bradley International Airport continue to be transported in a safe and secure manner," the Atlanta-based airline said in a statement Tuesday.

 

Although airlines try to minimize losses, opportunities for theft remain abundant because baggage and handlers aren't constantly supervised, experts said. Also, at many airports, especially smaller ones, major airlines rely on third-party contractors or subsidiaries with lower employee wage scales for baggage services, experts said.

 

The creation of the TSA might also be contributing to baggage theft. "The more people you have handling checked articles, the more opportunity there is," said Mann.

 

From May 2003 through early October of last year, TSA had fired 465 of its own security officers for stealing, said Ann Davis, an agency spokeswoman based in Boston. She said that the agency employs about 43,000 agents at a given time and that some of those who were dismissed were turned in by colleagues.

 

The Air Transport Association, a trade group that represents major U.S. airlines, does not keep data on luggage theft and hasn't looked into the phenomenon, spokesman David Castelveter said. He challenged the idea that bags are frequently pilfered and said that airlines take surveillance seriously. He declined to describe how airlines protect against baggage theft and said that the airlines were unlikely to be more forthcoming.

 

"No one is going to tell you the steps they take, because they're not going to compromise security," he said.

 

Douglas Laird, a former head of security for Northwest Airlines, said Tuesday that airlines generally accept that some baggage will be stolen or pilfered, and they figure that the cost of paying claims will remain lower than the cost of trying to snuff out thefts completely.

 

"That doesn't sound good," said Laird, now a private aviation consultant in Nevada, "but it's a business truth."