Star Trek

Jan. 10, 2005. 01:00 AM


Zap! and lost bag is found
Radio tracking tested at airports But is a found bag

also a delivered bag?


M. COREY GOLDMAN
FORWARD

US Airways dropped the bag  literally  over the holidays.

Thousands of passenger bags ended up sitting in US Airways' Philadelphia operating hub and other airport luggage-holding areas over the busy holiday weekend, sadly keeping respective owners and their clean underwear and amenities apart.

Never mind excuses of winter weather that forced hundreds of flight cancellations or the unusually high number of employees who supposedly called in sick that reportedly spawned the massive baggage blunder.

In the court of public opinion, US Airways, in bankruptcy for the second time and struggling, messed up good. Some analysts speculate the luggage foul-up was the final nail in its coffin.

Yet minimizing the frustration of missing luggage is something airports and airlines have been working on for some time.

Many are looking at a promising technology called Radio Frequency Identification Technology, or RFID, to lick the problem for good.

RFID gives any object its own programmable digital identity that can be read wirelessly. About the size of a grain of rice, an RFID tag emits a radio signal that can be picked up by a handheld or stationary reader or even a computer network.

Retailers and manufacturers have started using it to better track their products from the factory line to store shelves as have various aid organizations and companies shipping goods to tsunami-stricken South Asia.

The airline industry is getting into the game. Several airports in North America, Europe and Asia are developing RFID systems that help luggage and cargo go where they're supposed to.

Travelers flying out of Las Vegas' McCarran International Airport will soon be able to put RFID to the test.

McCarran has built the first of six new handling facilities in a multimillion dollar five-year project funded by the airline industry. They will have 70 RFID readers that scan the tiny chips and identify each bag with a traveler.

Every piece will be labelled with an RFID-enabled sticker, making it trackable from where it's checked in to McCarran's cargo area to the airplane and onto the carousel at other end.

McCarran has one facility running as a test operation. With traditional barcode stickers, McCarran right now has a 90 per cent read success rate, meaning 10 per cent of travellers' bags aren't being tracked. With RFID: a 99.9 per cent read success rate.

An important caveat to note, amid any hype, is that tracking is only part of the luggage battle; ultimately the bags must still be loaded, moved, and delivered.

"We thought RFID provided us with the best opportunity to achieve 100 per cent accuracy and help us avoid what happened recently with all the bags getting misdirected," says Sam Ingalls, McCarran's assistant director of information systems.

Privacy advocates have argued RFID infringes on consumers' privacy because it carries the potential not only to track stuff, but the people carrying it.

Officials at McCarran took care to address those concerns, says Ingalls. Customer information is not on the chip. Rather, each embedded chip will hold a three-letter header identifying the airport, followed by a unique 10-digit number that can be used to identify a customer in a database used only by airport personnel.

McCarran's baggage handlers often have trouble sorting the 65,000 bags that pass through the airport each day, as do handlers at many other major airports, Ingalls says.

Jacksonville International Airport is testing a radio tag system similar to McCarran's.

Zaventem airport in Brussels and Arlanda airport in Stockholm are already using RFID-enabled systems, as is Hong Kong's international airport.

Officials at the Greater Toronto Airport Authority have been looking at RFID but have yet to sign on, according to a GTAA spokesperson.

One catch: the tags' cost.

RFID tags are made using a process that resembles semiconductor manufacturing, and cost from 25 cents to 45 cents each. For McCarran International's 65,000 bags that would add up to $16,250 a day.

However, companies like Colorado Springs, Colo.-based OrganicID are already coming up with cheaper ways to make RFID tags. Their method uses a process that applies electronic inks and organic materials on to a flexible plastic surface. The projected cost: a penny a tag.

It will probably take a few more years for RFID to catch on. Privacy issues will continue to be of concern as people invent new ways of using the technology, like embedding medical records and tracking shipments of goods like Tide and Pampers right into a consumer's home.

For airlines and travellers, the good news is that when a bag is lost, at least there will be a way of finding out where it is.

The bad news is that consumers will have to steel themselves for the reality that their bags, and potentially themselves, could be tracked right into their hotel room or home.

At least they're not talking about using RFID to track passengers  yet.


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Forward assesses trends

in business technologies.

Reach M. Corey Goldman

at corey_goldman@yahoo.ca

my airport and other companies where i live could use this technology.