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RFID Helps Passengers Get a Seat on Lufthansa Flights
Lufthansa approached TBN in mid-2005 about a track-and-trace solution for its seats. The company had identified seat tracking and refitting as a particularly labor-intensive process. TBN designed the RFID application and implemented it at the end of 2005. Some 1,500 seats and rows of seats are tagged with passive 13.56 MHz tags conforming to the ISO 15693 standard, and were provided by Schreiner Group. The only data each tag contains is a unique ID number.
After being notified of a flight's required seat configuration, workers in the seat warehouse, located on the grounds of the Frankfurt airport, then begin loading onto trucks all seats that will need to be fitted into the plane. The employees move the seats or rows of seats from storage (all of which are stored on the ground) via a forklift specially designed to hoist these seats and the metal wheel bases (about 10-15 centimeters in height) on which they are kept. When a worker drives the forklift through the portal, an interrogator built into the floor, consisting of three custom-designed antennas, reads the RFID tags inside the plastic housing attached to a bar on the bottom of each seat or row of seats. The tags are attached with plastic cable ties and mounted on a spacer—a piece of plastic that acts as a buffer between the plastic housing and the metal of the bottom support of the seat.
During transportation, the seat RFID tag is approximately 40 centimeters above the ground. Therefore, TBN specially designed the RFID interrogator antennas to read the tags within a range of 60 centimeters. The company tested the system in its own workshop before implementing it on site at the airport, Kern says, and the deployed system achieved 100 percent read rates on the tests.
According to Kern, Lufthansa chose RFID because it wanted a solution that worked with limited involvement from employees. For this same reason, the company doesn't use a handheld reader—one that could be easily misplaced or left on a plane—in the warehouse. The only interrogators utilized are the portal readers.
Kern estimates that before the system was implemented, it took about 30 minutes to load 10 seats and collect the associated information. Now, with RFID, that process takes about five minutes. Lufthansa is planning to expand the application to about 80,000 seats at selected airports within the next two to three years, and to use the RFID tags to track their repair status.
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After being notified of a flight's required seat configuration, workers in the seat warehouse, located on the grounds of the Frankfurt airport, then begin loading onto trucks all seats that will need to be fitted into the plane. The employees move the seats or rows of seats from storage (all of which are stored on the ground) via a forklift specially designed to hoist these seats and the metal wheel bases (about 10-15 centimeters in height) on which they are kept. When a worker drives the forklift through the portal, an interrogator built into the floor, consisting of three custom-designed antennas, reads the RFID tags inside the plastic housing attached to a bar on the bottom of each seat or row of seats. The tags are attached with plastic cable ties and mounted on a spacer—a piece of plastic that acts as a buffer between the plastic housing and the metal of the bottom support of the seat.
During transportation, the seat RFID tag is approximately 40 centimeters above the ground. Therefore, TBN specially designed the RFID interrogator antennas to read the tags within a range of 60 centimeters. The company tested the system in its own workshop before implementing it on site at the airport, Kern says, and the deployed system achieved 100 percent read rates on the tests.
Kern estimates that before the system was implemented, it took about 30 minutes to load 10 seats and collect the associated information. Now, with RFID, that process takes about five minutes. Lufthansa is planning to expand the application to about 80,000 seats at selected airports within the next two to three years, and to use the RFID tags to track their repair status.
