samwise6222

126249?

Mrp Alert

I was hoping for a more memorable qr code. Next time I'll scan first for a good one.

BobH

Gee they're even framed in yellow -- just wonder if they'll be as 'efficient' as certain other yellow tags.

buy hey, they may make it easier to spot your bag when it comes off last

<lol>

Bob H

relangford

Would RFID also work? They don't need a battery.

DaDaDan

FT (and copyright law) say you should only post a snippet of an article and a link, not reproduce the entirety.

Starblazer

Not to derail too much, but two quick points.

1) You can take my dot matrix printer out of my cold, dead, early 30s hands. You are interfacing with early 60s technology and the laser printers do not handle sporadic input as well as dot matrix. Let's think Earth month here. Would you rather have a small section of blank paper or a whole page for every command you type and need output from? So much paper would be wasted if it printed three lines and then used the other 6" for nothing. Plus... it works! no drivers, no complicated setups in Windows/UNIX/Unisys/Whatever. People complain about thermal toilet paper BPs, how would you like it if the pilot screwed up and put the release on somewhere hot by accident and blacked it out? Can't happen with dot-matrix.

2) Paper boarding passes. While I will concur that the current trend of Delta toilet paper boarding passes suck for keepsakes, nevertheless paper is superior in one way. There's no auto-rotation on a piece of paper. The barcode is going to be the same either way I put it on the scanner or how I hold it. I don't have to worry about dropping the piece of paper because it's not worth 8000 billion apple dollars. Give me 80 good paper boarding passes, 18 damaged/miscalibrated ones and 2 hopeless ones and I will guarantee that I can have all them scanned before anyone can scan 100 electronic boarding passes. Heck, I would go even so far as to say you could lock the screens, lock the orientation, and make it so that the only thing that the screens can be are "ON and SHOW PASS"

tl;dr I can't stand it when Mr. Important in the SkyPriority lane doesn't have his boarding pass on his screen when he just shoved himself in the front of the line, now making everyone else Sky w/ paper wait.

Anyway, I'm curious about this etag/etrack thing. I wonder how it would go over in the states without one uniform cell phone carrier so how would "pinging" work. Plus, the TSA probably won't allow it considering the fact that information could be changed on the fly without human interaction after someone with nefarious purposes modified the unit to change the destination at Y time. Paper bag tags actually needs someone to rip them off and change them.

HDQDD

Passive RFID tags don't need a battery. This just happens to be a random field that I have experience with. When I worked for UA a decade ago, they were considering implementing RFID bag tags. The benefits are nice: being able to wave an RFID scanner over a bar cart or can to see which bags were in it, perhaps equipping the aircraft with readers to see real-time which bags were on-board, etc.

Since it would take many years to change out infrastructure, they would simply put RFID tags inside of the current barcode tags. We toured the LAS and HKG airport baggage systems which were both RFID. They worked well, but they still didn't have a 100% read rate. By comparison, barcode scanners are about 85-90%. Bags that can't be read go to a "manual encoder" (human) who either scans the tag that the barcode array couldn't see, or manually pushes a button for which pier/chute it needs to go to.

Ultimately we abandoned the project because the RFID tags were too expensive. At the time, they were about 9 cents per tag. Doesn't sound like much, but when you have 500,000 bag tags a day generated, it adds up ($45,000/day). And that doesn't include the cost of installing thousands of readers around the system (many millions). Ultimately, the business case for this didn't work back then.

In the case the OP posted, the tags would be re-used, which changes things a bit. I still think it's a weak case. There really isn't enough benefit to the carrier to justify the expense. You'll always have to have ID verified to check a bag (this prevents bad guys from just booking a fake itin, dropping a bomb into the bag system and blowing up an airport).