After having heard many horror stories about airlines losing their passengers' bags, I was surprisingly calm and collected on June 24 when, on alighting at Changi Airport, I found out that British Airways 'forgot' to load my bag on to my connecting flight from Heathrow, even after being explicitly told to do so at the JFK (New York) Airport.

Why was I calm? Because subconsciously, I had almost expected this to happen. Allow me to explain.

While waiting to board the BA flight to Singapore via London at the New York Airport, I read a news article in the New York Times on how bad connections and long security check queues at the Heathrow airport left many passengers flightless and fuming.

Even after reading that, I wasn't prepared for what I saw at Heathrow. First, the BA flight landed a little late (about 30 minutes) and my connecting flight to Singapore was only 30 minutes away.

Then we were kept sitting in the plane for a while because there was no available parking slot at Heathrow. I was getting panicky because it meant missing my flight to Singapore.

On voicing my concerns to Michael, the Head Attendant (I think), the reply I got was: 'There's really nothing that I can do as of now." Fine, no problem, I thought I could still make it.

After we were offloaded into the terminal bus, which took us to the arrival gate, the airport authorities refused to open the door and we all waited for at least 20 minutes in the bus.

No explanation given for the delay, and some authoritative gentleman brushed off any questions. Not that we had the time to question, so we ran to the security checkpoint to get to the connecting flight.

On reaching there, we were shocked to find a long queue at the security checkpoint. Thirty minutes later, at around 10.30pm, one hour after the scheduled departure of my BA flight to Singapore, we wearily made our way to the departure gate. Imagine our surprise and happiness when we found that the flight hadn't left.

Well, we made our way in among grumbling passengers, most of whom were bound for Sydney and had been sitting in the plane for one hour already, waiting for it to take off. No one knew why the flight was delayed. I would like to think that it was delayed because they were waiting for passengers from other delayed flights to join in, but not once were we approached by any official from BA to tell us that our flight is still waiting.

Anyway, we reached Singapore and immediately found out that all of us who departed from JFK and took the connecting flight, had our bags missing. The good news is that Sats, the handling agents for BA, already knew of the missing bags and asked us to file a Loss of Bag report, which we did.

Finally, I got my bag the next evening, all items intact. Now that I think about it, I cannot help but make comparisons between Singapore and the so-called 'First World countries' like the UK and the US, where the drab and dull huge airports are nothing but a two-hour torture regime.

Here in Singapore, at the gorgeous Changi Airport, it has always been smooth sailing. I am not a Singapore citizen or PR, not yet, but this time, I really felt proud to be working in Singapore.

Amit Nagpal (Mr)