Siemens Provide Incheon with Baggage Handling System

Incheon, South Korea’s busiest airport, is to get a 42km, state-of-the-art baggage handling system courtesy of the contract recently awarded to electronics giant Siemens and Posco, the South Korean steel makers.

Capable of handling over 22,000 pieces of luggage per hour, the new system will comprise over 216 check-in counters in departures, 10 carousels in arrivals, 14 make-up carousels and 18 laterals, with an additional storage facility for up to as many as 2,000 pieces of luggage.

Completion is set for September 2017, readying the airport both for the influx of visitors to the 2018 Winter Olympics and the completion of Incheon’s new U.S. $2.5bn (£1.6bn) Terminal 2, which will increase airport’s annual passenger capacity to 62 million. The new infrastructure is planned to seamlessly integrate into the existing, and will be controllable by both IT and automated systems.

Siemans is already familiar with Incheon’s current baggage handling capability. In 2008 the company upgraded systems in the airport’s satellite terminal to handle up to 56,000 items of baggage every hour and has provided ongoing IT support ever since.