An ergonomic assessment of the airline baggage handler

40interruptions (broken light path) caused by the leg or foot that crossed too far under theplane of the conveyor causing a collision. The area that the light beam covered was 20cm deep and 50 cm high.After the trails, the baggage handlers were asked to fill out a questionnaireevaluating what combinations of variables they found most suitable, and what ergonomicaspects they found to be most unfavorable/favorable. The baggage handlers wereinstructed to rank the variables from a scale of 1 to 10, one being poor, and 10 being mostoptimal or excellent.From a quality of work standpoint, observations were made to check if thechanges in height, speed, and angle of the mock conveyor affected the rate of baggagesorting errors, and the number of bags falling off the conveyor belt.All of the baggage handlers that participated in this experiment were givenstandard instruction about the purpose of the study. To negate the learning effects eachbaggage handler was allowed to go through the experiment only once under conditionsthat resembled that of a peak load situation which occurs several times during a normalwork day. The mock conveyor was set up with 63 bags that consisted of five differentdestination labels which were presented at a fixed pace and order. While sorting the bagsfor this trail the baggage handlers were not given any restrictions on the loading andsorting techniques to be used for the observations.An analysis of variance (ANOVA) table was created for the dependent variablesto evaluate the influence of the velocity, height, and angle, along with a Ryan EinotGabriel Welch multiple range test to determine the direction of influence. A Student t-test was also performed to determine if there was a significant difference between the