LONDON: Emirates, the world’s biggest long-haul carrier, can’t understand why robots — like the ones used by Amazon.com Inc’s warehouses — aren’t handling airport baggage yet.
Outlining what automation, artificial intelligence and big data can do for air travel, the carrier’s President Tim Clark laid out a vision in which robots, with no need for human intervention, would ID bags, put them in prescribed bins and later take them out of the aircraft. His concept also includes cutting back on what is still the most laborious part of flying — the central security search.
“That’s in today’s technology,” he told reporters in Sydney on Tuesday at the International Air Transport Association’s annual general meeting. “We can actually do this.” The entire process, from arrival at the airport, check-in, immigration through all the way to the boarding gates, would become seamless and uninterrupted, he said.
The technology can be deployed even for security searches, said Clark, 68, adding a passenger passing through the system would keep walking while being inspected by “lots of entities.”
If there’s a problem, “something will come out — I can’t say whether it’ll be humanoid or whatever — and stop him.”
Emirates is already close to producing a walk-though security system that doesn’t require passengers to remove boots and belts and offload mobile phones and keys.
The construction of the new Al Maktoum International Airport south of Dubai, which Clark says was designed with “old think,” has been paused so its architecture can be reworked to accommodate new technologies and the internet of things.
“If it means we delay a couple years, we have to do that,” Clark said. “Those that don’t do it are going to be problem children in the future.”
Any Etihad merger plan is up to shareholders
Hong Kong, New Delhi: Emirates Airline said any merger plan with Abu Dhabi’s Etihad Airways is for shareholders to decide and no such development is likely any time soon. “That is in the hands of the shareholders,” Emirates President Tim Clark said in a Bloomberg Television interview Tuesday in Sydney. “On the short-term, medium-term horizon, I would say no.”
Emirates is working with Etihad to look at areas of common ground without mixing up the brands and entering into competing areas, Clark said.
