NYT: Radio Tags Can Find Stray Bags, but Can Airlines Afford Them?

[DeepModem Mom]

Radio Tags Can Find Stray Bags, but Can Airlines Afford Them?
By BARNABY J. FEDER

Published: March 7, 2005


For three days last Christmas week, Janet Suckling haunted the Delta Air Lines baggage area at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport waiting for the arrival of a bag in which her wedding dress and her husband-to-be's tuxedo had been packed....

***

For the last several years, the airlines have envisioned sharply reducing this infuriating problem with new radio frequency identification, or RFID, tags that identify and track items with a precision unmatched by today's bar code scanning systems.

Advocates of the new technology say that it is ready for use. But major airlines would each have to invest tens of millions of dollars to adopt RFID luggage tracking. Most are in such dire financial straits that that kind of money could be as hard to come by as legroom in coach....

***

The industry tracks its bag-handling performance by measuring bags lost per 1,000 customers. While that number was below five in 2004, that stills adds up to millions of bags going astray annually. Chasing down misdirected luggage and paying claims on lost bags can cost $100 to $200 a bag, according to industry estimates....

***

According to SITA, a technology consulting group for the airline industry that is based in Switzerland, the airlines could save $650 million annually from worldwide deployment of radio tags on luggage....


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/07/technology/07baggage.html

[ucmike]

1. i doubt it.

i worked at newark airport for three years, after that i worked with a former baggage handler at tampa international (or whatever its called). a lot of "lost" baggage was rerouted by handlers for various reasons, many of them spiteful.

i've seen luggage laying on the road at newark, unretrieved, in the rain, for hours. i've seen carts full of luggage that could've been saved burned to ash on the airfield cause no one did anything.

my baggage handler friend told me that handlers would reroute oversized luggage or unusually heavy bags because they didn't want to deal with them. he also told me it was SOP to break luggage out of spite. as the new rolling baggage with extendable handles became popular people began overloading their bags-because you no longer have to lift and carry them since they have wheels. baggage handlers still have to lift them. in turn, the handlers will break your handle off, or break the wheels, so you have no choice but to carry the overloaded bag you packed.


radio tags might help if the system was trying to work, but with spiteful humans in the mix there's no guarantee.

[DeepModem Mom]

2. That is unsettling info, ucmike! Thanks for an inside view --

n/t