San Francisco Airport OKs RFID Bag-Tracking Pilot

By Mary Catherine O'Connor

Aug. 31, 2006—Beginning next spring, travelers flying from San Francisco International Airport (SFO) to Seoul, South Korea, on either Asiana Airlines or Korean Air, might have more luck than they do now in reuniting with their checked luggage upon landing at Seoul's Incheon International Airport. On Tuesday, an SFO commission approved plans from the two airlines to test an RFID baggage-tracking system.

By embedding RFID inlays into the tags attached to checked luggage, and by using the tags to sort and track the bags, these airlines and airports are hoping they can improve baggage handling, which is currently based on bar-code technology.

Asiana is already testing RFID-enabled baggage tracking at six Korean airports (see Asiana Deploying RFID at Six Airports). There, it has integrated RFID hardware into the conveyors and other extensively used baggage-handling systems. Still, many airports operate "common-use" baggage handling, wherein a number of airline's bags are run though the same material-handling equipment. Bar-code scanners linked to conveyor systems sort the bags by airline and by flight. Baggage for Asiana and Korean Air flights is handled this way at SFO, as well as at Incheon.

Incheon, Asiana and Korean Air initially approached SFO with a proposal for the tests, says Gerry Alley, who manages SFO's common-use baggage systems. In order to run a thorough test of RFID baggage tracking, the RFID tags need to be read both at the originating and destination airports. Tags might be readable at SFO, but if the tag can't be read and sorted accurately at the receiving airport, it won't improve baggage handling.

"Incheon wanted an end-to-end test, because you need to see both sides of the coin," says Alley, who indicates that the trial could include other airports, as well.

Because RFID does not require a line-of-site read, it captures data from a greater number of the baggage tags than bar-code readers, which can't read a tag if it is bent, dirty or out of alignment with the laser scanner. In pilots conducted by airlines, airports and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), RFID has increased the read rates of the bag tags by up to more than 90 percent. With bar codes, as little as 85 percent of tags are captured.