Paris : Three of the world's busiest airports — Charles de Gaulle (Paris), Schiphol (Amsterdam) and Narita (Tokyo) — have seen the first fruits of an extensive three-year tagging system aimed at curbing the number of lost baggage which costs the global airline industry billions of dollars each year, a senior Air France official told Gulf News.
Jean Paul Claret, job rotation manager of Air France's Ground Operations at Charles de Gaulle Airport Communications Hub, said: "We are currently testing a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) system alongside the traditional barcode system in these three stations. With it, we know exactly where a bag is located within our system by tagging each luggage and container [aircraft unit loading devices]. We're convinced it works and helps boost security."
Mishandled bags
The International Air Transport Association (IATA), reported in 2009 that a total of 7.8 million mishandled bags cost airlines around $2.5 billion (Dh9.2 billion). The on-going tests in the three hubs, which saw more than 80 million passengers between them so far this year, involves a slightly longer bar-code tag, said Claret. It includes a RFID chip, a contact-less integrated circuit already used by most countries in e-passports and by retailers to curb shoplifting.
The technology, however, comes at a huge price for airports. There's also a problem with lack of standards.
"The cost of putting RFID infrastructure at airports is up to five times the cost of the existing baggage tracking system, so we want to collaborate with others as an industry," said Claret.
An RFID tag, which costs about $0.20 apiece today, is also widely used in congestion charging (such as Salik), credit cards and Metro (Nol) cards. But retrofitting airport infrastructure to read and route tagged bags cost tens of millions of dollars more.
Both Hong Kong International and McCarran International in Las Vegas already use RFID, alongside the old barcode-based system.
Currently, 14 of 1,000 bags get lost due to the limits of the barcode-based tracking system, said Claret.
This is because barcodes need line-of-sight reading, which gets fooled when a barcode is smudged.
A RFID reader requires only a certain proximity to locate a bag.
Logistics links
"Our experiment with RFID shows we can achieve a much lower figure [of delayed luggage], close to zero," he said. IATA estimates that each missing or mishandled bag costs airlines an average of $100.
The use of RFID in logistics links moving cargo to the internet, allowing shippers to track them in real time. It may also help eliminate counterfeiting and allow manufacturers to sell directly to customers.
Today RFID's information system can be encrypted to prevent it from being read and potentially exploited. Consumer privacy advocates argue that RFID tagging threatens personal privacy and criminals or terrorists could clone it using inexpensive and readily available hardware.