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No abordé porque había perdido mi equipaje.

No abordé porque había perdido mi equipaje.
I didn't board because I had lost my luggage.
From Lesson 170:Sequencing past events·Spanish (Latin America)

Questions & Answers about No abordé porque había perdido mi equipaje.

Why do we use había perdido here instead of just the simple past?
Había perdido means had lost. We use the past perfect tense to show that an action was already completed before another action in the past. In this timeline, the luggage was lost first, which caused the second past action of not boarding (no abordé).
How exactly do you build the había perdido structure?
It is made of two parts: the imperfect tense of the helper verb haber (here, había for the I form) plus the past participle of the main verb (here, perdido from perder).
Había can mean I had or he/she/you had. How do we know who lost the luggage since there is no pronoun?
The first verb, abordé, only matches the I form in the preterite tense. Because of this context, it is naturally understood that the second part of the sentence also refers to the speaker. Adding yo before either verb is not necessary.

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