Have you seen this bag?
Logan Airport to test 'indoor radar' as a replacement for its often inefficient luggage tracking based on bar codes
By Peter J. Howe, Boston Globe, 12/18/2006
Lost luggage is more than just a source of frustration for airline passengers. It represents an estimated $2.5 billion annual problem for airlines that have to reunite bags with owners.
In spring, Logan International Airport officials will attack the problem with cutting-edge technology. Logan plans to test a system whose inventor describes it as "indoor radar" -- bag tags embedded with unique patterns of metallic fibers that can be "read" by electronic readers as they whiz by on conveyor belts at up to 25 miles per hour.
The test will be limited, involving only luggage handled by Lufthansa, the German airline, which runs a daily flight from Boston to Frankfurt and accounts for just 1.4 percent of Logan's passengers.
For now, the system will supplement, not replace, existing luggage-routing systems, which use the same fundamental bar-code scanning technology as do supermarket checkout aisles.
But depending on how well it works, Logan just might prove to be the birthplace of the next big idea for keeping bags moving -- accurately -- through airports and onto planes.
"It's pretty exciting stuff," said Dennis Treece, director of security for the Massachusetts Port Authority, which runs Logan. "Everybody's been looking at how to do a better job with baggage, and there's a potentially huge savings, if it does work."
SITA, a global software and technology company that has installed bag-handling systems at scores of airports, estimates airlines spend $25 to $150 to reconnect lost bags with owners, counting everything from airport bag agents' hourly wages to charges for delivering a lost bag to a hotel.
With 30 million bags misrouted worldwide annually, 200,000 of which are lost forever, SITA pegs the total cost at $2.5 billion.
Today, it's not uncommon for a piece of luggage to travel a mile or more along conveyor belts behind airline check-in counters, with detours through locked-down Transportation Security Administration inspection rooms where bags are scanned for explosives, weaponry, and other contraband.
The standard technology for automating bags' ride through the airport relies on bar codes printed on the sticky white labels that gate agents or skycaps loop around baggage handles.
When the time comes for a bag to be shunted off the main conveyor belt onto the belt for a specific airline or a specific flight, automated systems using bar-code scanners attempt to read the code, correlate it to the airline and flight number, then trip a "pusher," a panel that pops out of the conveyor belt wall like a hockey player delivering a hip check, to shunt a bag down the right chute.
But 5 to 20 percent of the time bar codes go unread because they're wedged under a suitcase or smudged or the optical scanner has been compromised by dust or grime. That means the bag rides to the end of the belt and has to be carried by a human to the right airline baggage train. US airlines carry roughly 50 million passengers a month, and depending on the ratio of day-tripping road warriors and vacationers, roughly that many bags, as well.
Worse is when stickers get ripped off bags.
Many airport "baggage tunnels" are virtually wallpapered with missing bag stickers that fell or got yanked off bags. De-stickered baggage goes to the airport version of the dead-letter office, where airline agents hope there's a luggage tag with the owner's name -- or some identifying information inside -- to help them determine where the bag needs to go.
In recent years, many airline and airport officials have looked to "radio frequency identification" tags, called RFID, as a better alternative. These are labels that have the equivalent of a Massachusetts Turnpike FastLane transponder inside, emitting a unique numerical identifier for the bag and its assigned flight.
Hong Kong is the first airport to go all-RFID.
McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas is sorting about 77 percent of bags using a Symbol Technologies Inc. system. It expects to be at 100 percent by later this winter, airport spokesman Chris Jones said.
In Las Vegas, at about 21 cents each, the RFID tags cost much more than standard printed tags. But by improving the accuracy of baggage sorting from around 90 percent to over 99 percent, the system has cut the number of bags airline workers are manually carrying to about 700 a day from 7,000. Jones said even with the $25 million cost of Symbol's five-year contract, airport officials think the system more than pays for itself in overall improvements in efficiency, including airlines' savings.
The big holdups for wider RFID use, though, are the up-front cost and the same kind of years-long wrangling -- seen earlier in everything from videotapes to cellphone networks -- over what should be the worldwide technology standard.
The system Logan will test, developed by Northern Virginia inventor Mort Greene of Inkode Inc., resembles RFID, but with simpler tags that don't require batteries. "Chipless RFID," as Greene calls it, could thus be far cheaper. It uses bag tags with unique patterns of metal fibers woven in them, which are "read" by machines that emit radio waves and measure how they bounce back from the tag.
Unlike RFID, Greene said, the system doesn't get snarled by static electricity, which is abundant in a bag-belt environment with rubber rubbing rubber and plastic all day long. The Logan test will use "indoor radar" tags similar to today's bar-code tags that would still be vulnerable to coming off bags.
But if the tags became an industry standard, because the radio waves that read them can pass through suitcases, they could go inside most kinds of non-metallic luggage, eliminating the tear-off risk entirely.
Terminal E, where the test will happen, is the only baggage operation Massport runs. Logan's other baggage systems are strictly airline-controlled. Behind Terminal E's two broad airline check-in counters are over 14,000 feet, or 2 1/2 miles, of baggage belts leading through TSA inspection facilities to six different final sorting destinations for the various airlines.
Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when two jetliners that took off from Logan were used to lay waste to New York's World Trade Center, Massport has turned Logan into a hotbed for testing high-tech security gear, including everything from instant anthrax bomb detection kits to advanced eye scanners that would confirm the identities of frequent travelers the government confirms aren't terrorists or criminals.
In this instance, Treece said, the new luggage tracking technology does have the appeal of being cutting-edge -- but frugal, too.
"Inexpensive plus reliable," Treece said, "equals a good thing to have, in my book."