Delta Investing In Baggage Finder

Delta Air Lines will invest up to $25 million in a new system to track lost luggage using radio frequencies, becoming the first airline to roll out technology nationwide as others in the industry also explore such techniques to reduce costs, improve security and reduce traveler aggravation over lost baggage.

Delta mishandles less than 1 million of the 80 million pieces of luggage it transports annually, but locating those bags and returning them to their owners costs the company $100 million annually, airline spokesperson Reid Davis said. By 2007, Delta plans to embed a Radio Frequency Identification code in a tag on every bag it flies within the United States so fewer bags are lost and those that are mishandled can be located instantly.

RFID technology widely is used to track packages, allows commuters to breeze through tollbooths with just an E-ZPass sticker in their car windows, safeguards hospital blood supplies and even track herds of livestock. It works by embedding a code into a tag or a transponder that is read wirelessly, often by a handheld computer.

"We are using this technology to improve customer service," Davis, said, adding it will take the airline two years to roll out the technology throughout its domestic mainline system. The airline also saves money by reducing the amount of manual intervention dealing with lost, damaged and delayed bags and returning them to travelers, he said.

The airline industry sees the technology as an opportunity to more accurately ensure bags fly on the same aircraft as their owners, which will help meet federal anti-terrorism requirements that all passenger bags be screened before being loaded onto airplanes, and help curtail the nearly 200,000 cases of mishandled baggage on U.S. airlines every month.

"RFID should lead to a dramatic reduction in lost baggage and enhance security by facilitating passenger bag matching," according to the Air Transport Association, the trade association representing U.S. airlines.

U.S. carriers reported 199,788 cases of mishandled baggage in May, or an average of 4.13 bags for every 1,000 passengers, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. That was up from an average of 3.65 reports per 1,000 passengers during the same month one year ago. Delta performed better than the industry average, with 23,597 cases of mishandled bags while flying 7.4 million passengers in May, a rate of 3.19 incidents per 1,000 passengers, according to DOT. Still, Davis said, the airline believes RFID can further improve this performance and give it a competitive edge over its rivals. "We wouldn't be doing it otherwise," Davis said.

The rollout will expand Delta's related efforts to implement a wireless baggage transfer system at its Cincinnati hub and to use wireless technology in Atlanta to make it easier to dispatch the personnel who are responsible for bags. It also represents a significant expansion of the usage of RFID technolgy. Rival Northwest Airlines deployed the technology at Seattle Tacoma International Airport, while Las Vegas McCarran International Airport hosted an airportwide implementation of the technology, funded, in part, by a grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Preliminary results at McCarran showed RFID accurately routed 99.7 percent of bags, compared with 89 percent correctly processed using optical scanning of bar codes on luggage tags.

While the airlines are focused on reducing customer complaints related to lost luggage and saving costs, the Transportation Security Administration sees an opportunity to use RFID technology to improve airline security. TSA in the past year has distributed more than $8 million in grants to more than one dozen airports, such as Salt Lake City, which received $924,000 to purchase and deploy a Web-based RFID system to track the location of mobile resources, such as baggage carts and other vehicles near and around aircraft.

SCS Corp., a San Diego-based company, recently installed RFID technology to help screen baggage at San Francisco International Airport's new international terminal. The technology allows the security workers automatically to identify and reroute baggage that is selected for advanced security screening.

"This technology offers the aviation industry many proven benefits, with the ultimate objective being continued safety, airworthiness and operational efficiencies for commercial airplanes," said Kenneth Porad, RFID program leader for Boeing Commercial Airplanes.

Boeing and rival Airbus SAS sponsored a conference last week in Hong Kong to explore wider applications of the technology in the aviation industry, including tagging engine and airplane parts to streamline manufacturing.

For now, the industry leader appears to be Matrics Inc., a Rockville, Md.-based company that won contracts implementing the system tracking all checked passenger baggage in Las Vegas and more recently Hong Kong. The company also worked with Delta in preliminary tests. Piyush Sodha, Matrics chairman and CEO, said: "RFID is a cost-effective, scalable technology ideal for airline and airport applications across the world."