BA lost 23 bags per 1,000 passengers last year when more than 33 million people flew with them. You do the maths.

Twenty per cent of these never get reunited with their owners as they may end up in some unrelated countries because of misreading of labels, or get pilfered or they may end up being destroyed or auction off after 45 days. I harbour the fear that ours may be the unlucky 20 per cent.

It has been more than 72 hours since my son, my niece and I returned to Singapore on July 23 on British Airways Flight BA 15 from Heathrow Terminal Four without a single of our six check-in bags.

A Changi Airport Lost and Found department worker manning the utterly busy hotline told me that more than 60 passengers in Singapore are still waiting for their bags and the wait may be just overnight or longer than a week.

Thousands of bags are stranded in Heathrow because of some faulty baggage belt. The worker at the airport who took down my report for the loss said that BA flights into Singapore have been experiencing this problem for a week.

Isn't this the repeat of the problem (and blame the fog too) last year where more than 28,000 pieces of baggage were left stranded in Heathrow over two weeks?

Our group of three actually had a 12-hour transit in London as our first BA flight initiated in Toronto. We had requested 'Through check-in to Singapore" in Toronto and I did check the baggage tags so there was no mistake on the Canadian side.

Isn't 12 hours sufficient for the understaffed baggage handlers in Heathrow Terminal Four to ensure that the baggage be loaded onto another BA flight in the same terminal?

I had not realised that BA had been plagued with the lost-baggage problem since last year as I had done the same route without a glitch in March when I visited my daughter who was studying in Toronto.

I went online and Googled 'BA lost baggage" to check on the baggage tracer service and, lo and behold, came across numerous unflattering reports on BA from aviation bodies, BBC, CNN and more.

I am scared. I am worried. I am stressed. What happens when we don't ever see our luggage again? We can replace the clothes, the souvenirs and the gifts we bought during future trips. I can replace the text books my son brought along on our month-long trip to complete his school-holiday assignments.

However, how am I going to replace the book prizes my daughter had won over two years while actively participating in numerous debates and public-speaking competitions in Canada? How about the latest graduation prizes she received from her school which we hurriedly packed into our luggage?

Does BA have the right to dispose of our "lost luggage" if it fails to unite us within 45 days? What is it doing to the supposedly hundreds or thousands of 'lost baggage' already lying in its so-called 'reclaim baggage" area in Heathrow?

I do not wish that mine would end up in that area, waiting to be forgotten and disposed of when the time is up. Has BA been making every effort to unite baggage with owners or is it just wanting the easy way out in dishing out compensation rather than in investing in man-hours and logistics to solve the problem?

With the present backlog of undelivered baggage which indicates very serious problems, are the relevant British authorities really finding solutions to solve the prevalent problem?

Will the problems persist in the up-and-coming Heathrow Terminal 5? Is Britain really ready to receive the next Olympics crowd after Beijing?

How Yin Wai