RFID for the bag is all very well, but as usual they're missing the point. Who cares where they track your bag to, you only want it to be in one place, on your aircraft, preferably without some baggage handler or TSA screener rifling through it first to find his kids Xmas presents.
The only system that makes sense to me is the one I heard of on Gizmag, where two brits have a thing called a Luggage Passport. The RFID angle is that one RFID chip goes in your bag, the other in the passport. Both are scanned as you move through the airport and if both don't make it to the plane, and alarm is raised. Sounds simple enough to me. Of course, making sure your bag arrives on board with you is not as important as impressing shareholders, so don't expect a sudden worldwide takeup of the idea.
One last point, most of the truly "lost" luggage as opposed to that stolen at will, is lost through the luggage destination information being torn off the handles. It seems unlikely that putting RFID on the same tags will do more than allow the system to trace all the torn off tags, not the bags. That won't be much of a relief for the hundreds of thousands whose bags disappear each year!
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Hagrid @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM
RFID for the bag is all very well, but as usual they're missing the point. Who cares where they track your bag to, you only want it to be in one place, on your aircraft, preferably without some baggage handler or TSA screener rifling through it first to find his kids Xmas presents.
The only system that makes sense to me is the one I heard of on Gizmag, where two brits have a thing called a Luggage Passport. The RFID angle is that one RFID chip goes in your bag, the other in the passport. Both are scanned as you move through the airport and if both don't make it to the plane, and alarm is raised. Sounds simple enough to me. Of course, making sure your bag arrives on board with you is not as important as impressing shareholders, so don't expect a sudden worldwide takeup of the idea.
One last point, most of the truly "lost" luggage as opposed to that stolen at will, is lost through the luggage destination information being torn off the handles. It seems unlikely that putting RFID on the same tags will do more than allow the system to trace all the torn off tags, not the bags. That won't be much of a relief for the hundreds of thousands whose bags disappear each year!
H@grid