An ergonomic assessment of the airline baggage handler

25When the safety professionals were polled about the manual handling tasks mostlikely to cause injury, the majority response was stacking baggage inside the baggagecompartment of a narrow body aircraft with 14 responses. This is somewhat consistentwith the responses given above, which baggage handling locations were the most likelyto cause injury, as it relates to working conditions of a narrow body aircraft. The secondbaggage-handling task mostly likely to cause injury was the transferring of baggage froma trailer directly into an aircraft through the cargo door, which received 11 responses.Pushing and pulling containers and pallets inside wide body aircraft, along with loadingbaggage onto trailers in the baggage make-up room were the third and fourth mostselected areas, with nine and eight responses, respectively.It is interesting to note that in Dell's interview of the 16 safety professionals from16 different airlines that when asked if their company imposes a weight limit on bags thatbaggage handlers can lift, only 1 out of the 16 stated that there was a limit of 70 lbs(32kg). The rest, 15 out of 16, stated that baggage handlers were required to lift bags that