Airport’s $140M overhaul of baggage handling will be ‘much smarter system’

Beneath the footfalls of travelers moving through the Indianapolis International Airport terminal, a sprawling series of conveyors, security monitors and other machinery moves thousands of checked bags each day.

But as the complex baggage-handling system nears the end of its useful life, airport officials face a substantial challenge: building its replacement in the same space.

So starting late next year and then for two more years, construction crews, bag handlers, federal security workers and airport personnel will have to maneuver an active construction site—all without disrupting the facility’s daily frenzy of arrivals and departures.

“We kind of describe this as doing open-heart surgery while the patient is running a marathon,” said Chris Norton, CEO of Arlington, Texas-based aviation design firm VTC, which is overseeing the project’s planning.

“That sounds really scary, but we do it all the time because we have to,” she said. “The baggage-handling system is the heart of the airport—without it, passengers won’t get their belongings and will be disgruntled, so it’s extremely important.”

The Indianapolis Airport Authority, which runs the airport and several others in central Indiana, expects to spend nearly $140 million on the project.

While the upgrade plan has received early support from the agency’s board—including contract authorizations for design work—it hasn’t been given the green light yet. That won’t come until early next year, when design work and construction pricing is further along.

But officials say a reconfigured checked luggage system is a necessity that will pay off in the long run by being more efficient and secure.

A new system would replace a labyrinth of carousels designed in 2006 and installed during the terminal’s construction in 2008—before the Transportation Security Administration set national standards for screening checked luggage.

Indianapolis was the first terminal built after 9/11 and was state-of-the-art at the time. But without modifications, the airport’s linear conveyors that serve only one or two airlines apiece aren’t compatible with the TSA’s modern, explosive-detection systems.

Currently, most major airlines have their own dedicated conveyor for bag drops, which are found at their ticket counters inside the front doors; smaller airlines share conveyors. Luggage is sent over several thousand feet of track and through TSA scanners before being carried down to ground-level spaces, known as makeup units, where airline workers load it onto carts for aircraft.

If an item needs additional scanning—often those are electronic devices or golf clubs—that happens in a dedicated room operated by TSA. Any item scanned or physically inspected in that room receives a tag indicating it was handled directly by the agency.

Other conveyors dedicated to arriving flights are in the same space, with a simpler design: A cart with luggage from a flight unloads the items to one of the chutes leading to a baggage-claim conveyor where passengers pick up their belongings.

The new design would consolidate baggage handling and scanning through two interconnected systems built side-by-side. Airline ticket desks could send any luggage to any part of the system, with items funneled to designated spots for TSA scanning before being routed to the correct conveyor for transport to a plane.

Necessary upgrades

Jarod Klaas, senior director of planning and development for the Indianapolis Airport Authority, said the design is focused on efficiency and improved security. He called the project “one of the most important” on the airport’s list of necessary capital improvements because it will support advanced security and tracking technologies developed by federal officials since the terminal opened 17 years ago.

The $140 million system should keep the airport in good shape for the average 20- to 25-year life—mechanically and technologically—of most baggage-handling systems.

The project aims to speed TSA security checks and allow for more operational flexibility during peak travel days by reducing system clogs.

“Bags will [be able to] come in from anywhere, and once they’re scanned, get back to any place automatically,” Klaas said. “It will be a much smarter system than the current one … so if a single machine goes down, the system still functions.”

Early designs include mechanisms to prevent luggage from being lost as well as designated spots near the terminal’s entry that will be turned into self-service bag drops.

The airport is also considering adding a bag drop inside the $206 million Westin hotel, now under construction on the property, that could feed into the baggage-handling system, Klaas said.

Alternatively, the airport could adopt a different style of handling, called an individual carrier system, that puts each piece of luggage on its own tray or bin to be toted automatically to where it needs to be using a radio frequency identification—or RFID—tag. The airport hasn’t decided which approach to take.

“We are going from what is essentially a point-to-point system to a consolidated system that has a lot more flexibility, a lot more redundancy and allows the airport to put a bag in anywhere and have it come out anywhere,” said VTC’s Norton.

A bag can be “put in any ticket counter they have and go to any makeup unit, which they can’t do today,” she said. “It also allows them to use the full capacity of the explosive-detection machines they have, which they also can’t do.”

‘A very tricky project’

Norton, whose firm is working alongside Cincinnati-based project manager Messer Construction and several other design firms, said the airport’s existing architecture offers some installation advantages.

In some airports, baggage areas are too cramped to allow for construction of a new system, then removal of the old, in the same space. Those airports require terminal additions, but not here.

“This is going to be a very tricky project, but because we had [available space], it seemed perfect to use it,” Norton said. Designs call for building a mezzanine above the existing system to contain portions of the new one.

“Another option could have been to build something else entirely, or to look at a different area, but we didn’t have to do that because the space is there.”

Norton said there’s still “a lot of discussion” about how to execute the project, which could require adding support beams. But she said the ability to stay within the existing structure allows a shorter construction schedule and lower costs.

VTC has designed dozens of baggage-handling systems, including at Chicago O’Hare, Dallas/Fort Worth, Denver and Los Angeles international airports.

The Indianapolis project is expected to be constructed in phases so portions can be certified by the Federal Aviation Administration and brought online as they’re completed.

That means each airline will at some point have to cope with its checked-bag counter being taken offline while it’s connected to the new system. So travelers could notice their items being shuffled to other bag drops, although Klaas said he doesn’t expect that to cause significant delays.

In fact, the goal is that “not one bag will go out late, and no aircraft will go out late,” he said. “It’s a pretty tall order to fill, but I think we’ve got the right crew to do it.”

Security matters

The planned improvements follow a TSA-mandated upgrade to the airport’s explosive-detection machines. That upgrade is a separate, $10 million project set for completion by mid-2026. The airport received federal funding to pay for the machines, which will be integrated into the updated baggage system as that work is completed.

Also, the airport last year installed a dozen new baggage scanners in the passenger-facing TSA security checkpoints, the first significant upgrades in that area since before the pandemic.

Aaron Batt, Indiana federal security director for the agency, said the airport’s baggage-transit system configuration is unusual for post-9/11 airports, as most now use a consolidated conveyor design.

He said Indianapolis’ decentralized, linear system means the airport is ultimately “accepting more risk” for delays in getting bags through the security systems. If one conveyor’s detectors go offline, bags must be manually moved to another area so they can be screened by the TSA’s K-9 teams before being returned to the baggage system or sent elsewhere for additional inspection.

“There are times when there’s uncertainty on where a bag is in the system, and there’s also situations in which we might want to reintroduce bags back into the system, and that’s very difficult with what we have today,” Batt said. “With the new system, they’re really thinking about the future.”

Possible upsides

The new system is also being designed to accommodate anticipated increased air travel. More than 5.1 million passengers traveled through Indianapolis in the first half of this year; in 2024, the airport handled more than 10.4 million passengers.

Mike Boyd, owner of Denver aviation planning firm Boyd Group International, said he expects Indianapolis to see significant growth in passenger numbers—and might even be poised to become an international traffic magnet. He predicted that Indianapolis will be “getting more international flights in the next 10 years—a lot more.”

He said the new baggage system is “going to make the airport more efficient.”

“Foreign carriers are going to be at the gate, and that means you’ve got to prepare for that,” Boyd said.

Purdue Polytechnic aviation professor Volodymyr Bilotkach said the Indianapolis airport is unlikely ever to rival Atlanta or Chicago’s O’Hare, but updated and more efficient behind-the-scenes infrastructure could be a major selling point for international airliners.

“The centralized system might help the airport to try to convince some airlines to maybe set up a secondary hub in Indianapolis,” he said. “If this investment is used in a clever way, like in a marketing campaign, I cannot see why [the investment] cannot recoup itself.”

The airport authority expects to use municipal bonds to pay for the project, although Klaas said it is continuing to pursue federal grants to cover up to $28 million of the cost.

“Because of the criticality of this project and the fact that grant funding is somewhat a question mark, we’ve programmed this as a priority project in the capital budget” for 2026, Klaas said.

“So from a budget perspective, we assumed it was 100% debt-financed,” he said. “So any grant money that we are able to apply toward the project just allows us to do other capital projects in other places in the airport system.”•

Editor’s note: The graphic accompanying this story has been updated to show that Zurbuch Construction Consulting is Indianapolis-based.