a good deal of express packages travel in the airplanes you fly on too - UPS, Fedex et al frequently buy cartons of luggage to stick on commercial passenger rou

a good deal of express packages travel in the airplanes you fly on too - UPS, Fedex et al frequently buy cartons of luggage to stick on commercial passenger routes. So it's entirely possible your luggage would get there in the same plane you would too. :) The difference is, luggage that goes with you on an airplane has different rules than packages sent via a delivery company; you can thank the TSA and FAA for that. The assumption is that a bag belonging to a passenger is more likely to blow up than a package sent via ups. Plus, the lag time between shipping from destination is different - in an airport, you got an hour or so to get it from the check in desk, to the airplane. That's an hour in which the bags have to be sorted, scanned, loaded and then driven to the plane, where they're inserted into the hold. I would imagine that couriers like UPS do it differently: arrive at destination, sort into priority bins, scan, etc... it would be much more oriented around tipping point load - when there's enough in x, do y.