Progress towards using radio tags to track baggage has been slow, but several trials show it can work. Now the technology has IATA backing
Delta Air Lines is testing advanced technology that uses radio frequencies to tag and track bags, locate spare parts, manage maintenance and inventory control and in general bring high technology further than ever to the ramp and back shop. Delta is contemplating a major financial commitment of as much as $15 million in this RFID, or Radio Frequency IDentification technology. That, says the airline's director of airport strategy Rob Maruster, "will transform the airline on the ramp as much as radar did to transform air traffic control. When that happened, it was as if a light was turned on and people said, oh, so that's where the planes are. This technology will do that for bags. People will say, oh, so that's where the bags are."
RFID's virtues are many: it assigns a specific tag and identification number to each bag and allows each one to be located. Because RFID systems use radio waves, they can be interactive and so generate an entire process or transaction record while updating inventory continuously. They also avoid the line-of-sight limitations of barcode technology. The RFID tags contain far more information than the barcodes now common to paper tags and, unlike barcodes, RFID tags can be read in batches.
Maruster's statement may be sweeping, but this technology holds widespread implications, not just for airline operations but for aircraft manufacturing and air cargo operations. Delta and other majors are keenly aware of the way in which public anger over poor bag handling, combined with flight delays in the late 1990s, led Congress to the brink of reregulation. With rapidly increasing traffic levels and airport congestion approaching critical levels at many key hubs, customer service levels will again be crucial. Pat Rary, a Delta bag systems manager, says: "With this technology, we won't have to wait for the customer to come tell us that the bag is lost. We can tell the customer it's on the wrong plane and start responding before it's a crisis." Eventually, RFID should be able to signal an arriving passenger's cell phone with news of how long it will be before the bag is on the carousel.
Delta says that 99.3% of the bags it handles arrive at the proper destination on schedule - but that still translates to 800,000 misplaced bags a year. That costs millions of dollars in extra handling as well as public goodwill, says Maruster.
Jim Logue, Delta's system manager for ramp and baggage strategy development, told an RFID forum in Atlanta that the airline has conducted the first stage of a test in which it used tags to monitor bags moving between Atlanta Hartsfield and Jacksonville, Florida. The airline did not collect data on how the test affected baggage delivery, but wanted only to see how the tags would hold up. Logue says Delta gathered valuable experience in locating the right spot to place the RFID tag on the baggage label and the right place within the container or hold to place them. This is to avoid damage and to develop "anti-collision" knowledge to help limit radio signals interference with each other.
Delta is set to launch another set of tests this summer. One will involve placing RFID tags on 30 engine parts on a Boeing 757 in regularly scheduled service; the other will use RFID tags that can signal back as well as receive signals to track parts inventory at a few selected ground repair shops. Martin Kangiser, Delta general manager of material services, told the forum that parts information is collected and entered with 99.5% accuracy, meaning hundreds of errors a month must later be corrected manually.
The in-flight test is intended to determine how RFID tags hold up under the intense conditions aircraft engines face, while the inventory test will measure gains in efficiency and data accuracy. For applications like this, the cost of the RFID tag is less of a concern that for higher volume baggage handling. Ken Porad, who directs RFID policy for Boeing, says: "On a $450,000 part, a few dollars [per RFID tag] is more than acceptable."
Delta, like others, wants the price of RFID technology to come down, says Maruster. However, it is in the right "ballpark", enabling Delta to move ahead with plans to issue a request for proposals that could lead to a $15 million commitment for RFID and related technology for spare parts and bag handling. For the airline industry, the timing of the RFID adoption is crucial because major commercial forces have begun forcing the highly fragmented suppliers of RFID equipment toward standards: a decree by the US Department of Defense and one by retail behemoth Wal-Mart (with annual sales of $256 billion) require suppliers and vendors to use RFID in most shipments. Both requirements take effect in January. Airbus and Boeing each plan to require RFID in 2005 to help them manage inbound parts and supplies, and "to change some basic processes to make our industry competitive", says Airbus vice-president for spares Pierre Steffen. He told the conference that better process tracking through RFID use could save Airbus as much as $400 million a year.
Limited applications
Elsewhere, investment in RFID for passenger bag handling has been limited to individual airports. McCarran in Las Vegas will phase in this system in the summer. The airport is able to take the initiative because it supplies the common computerised check-in process shared by most of its carriers. The optical scanning rate with bar codes on tags is 80-90%, but the target is 99.8% validity for the RFID chips. The Las Vegas project, however, is limited to handling within the airport, which is the nation's seventh busiest. The $25 million project will have to handle 65,000 bags a day.
In addition, this year Amsterdam Schiphol airport and KLM will track baggage carried on flights to and from Tokyo's Narita airport using RFID chips to determine if the technique is better or faster than barcodes. The test runs to August. Elsewhere, Hong Kong International airport plans a $3.5 million-plus RFID installation that will allow real-time bag tracking.
Delta's project may draw much attention to RFID applications, but airports, according to the recent Airport IT Trends Survey conducted by Airline Business, ACI and SITA tend to lag globally. Almost half of the airports in the survey have no plans to implement RFID for either baggage or cargo, with most adopting a wait-and-see approach.
But the technology recently gained a powerful backer - IATA. It wants industry to adopt RFID technology as part of a larger campaign to simplify passenger travel. IATA senior vice-president Tom Murphy says: "This is going to be a little like urging the airlines to get ready for Y2K, except that the need for this kind of technological adaptation will not pass on a certain date."
REPORT BY DAVID FIELD IN ATLANTA
Source: Airline Business
