bahgheera

I stayed in a $200 / night hotel in California back in January, and the last night I was there I came back to the room to find a toilet brush laying on the bathroom counter on top of my toothbrush.

Not OP but a former ramper here. The craziest thing I ever loaded was a suitcase belonging to Luis Guzman. My buddy came into the break room and said hey guess who's in the restaurant upstairs, it's Luis Guzman! So I said okay let's go up there and see him. We went upstairs and walked by, I didn't see him. We walked by again, I still didn't see him. We walked by a third time and this time I saw him and he was looking at us with his trademark scowl and it startled me so bad that I just kept on going and went back downstairs.

Later I got to thinking "was that really him though?" So when it came time to load that particular flight we all went out to the baggage carts and I started looking through all the tags until I found one that had his name on it. I picked the bag up and said hey look y'all, it was really him! Everyone was looking at me funny, somebody motioned to the windows of the terminal. I turned around and looked and he was standing there in the window staring straight at me, with the scowl and everything. I almost jumped out of my skin.

So I'll comment on this. I used to be a ramper in the US, and we would occasionally have an HR (human remains) in the bin. Normally they'd come in a wooden structure sort of thing encased in cardboard, sort of like a shipping crate and a box combined. You basically have to manhandle it in and out of the bin onto the loader especially on a smaller plane like an e145 or something. It can be a pain and unnerving at the same time.

Anything large like that you have to maneuver through the bin while on your knees or bent over until you get it close enough to the door that you can slide it onto the belt loader.

As for the speed, I've figured it to be, with a blade length of 86 ft. and a rotation period of 4 seconds, about 200mph at the tip of the blade.

I've never been confident on my math with that though, feel free to correct.

I'll tell you a trick that's worked for me. Go to Goodwill (if you were in the US) or some other thrift shop and buy a cheap suitcase there. I can usually pick one up for like five bucks.

That way when the ramp rats destroy your bag, you're only out 5 bucks.

Or, even cheaper, you could talk to a baggage agent at the airport and ask if they have anything they're going to toss. Every so often they have a few bags that are broken and damaged and they're going to throw away, and you might be able to fix one up. I've done that in the past.

I used to get about 6 months of use out of a bag before it was completely destroyed. That being said, my current bag has lasted about 5 years amazingly enough.