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Denver Airport Automated Baggage System Abandoned
cherylchase writes "Denver International Airport opened in 1995 with an ambitious fully automated baggage system: 26 miles of underground track, thousands of small gray carts, all controlled by a mainframe programmed for just in time delivery. But the system never worked well; bugs delayed the airport's opening for months (at $1M/day). The system has now been abandoned as a cost cutting measure." From the article: "Technology, too, has brought change. Back then, the big-brained mainframe doing it all from command central was the model of high tech. Today the very idea of it sounds like a cold-war-era relic, engineers say. Decentralization and mobile computing technology have taken over just about everything, allowing airlines, warehouse operators and shippers like FedEx to learn with just a few clicks the whereabouts of an item in motion, a feature that was supposed to be a chief strength of the baggage system."
Because I wonder what we as Americans can ever do *right*. From being whipped in Iraq, out sourcing that's out of hand, border problems and immigration, the [huge] deficit, the soaring health-care costs within a system that is broken, what can I say? Please, can some American tell me what we as Americans can ever do right?
We can learn a little from our European friends. The port of Rotterdam's entire loading and off loading of containers plus tracking is operated 100% by robots. There is no human soul on the tarmac! None! Even the trucks seem to understand traffic rules on the piers...and everything just goes smoothly. I guess we can learn from them. USA has become a technology importer and not an exporter. All in all, I am not surprised. Only the chimp can save us it he/it decides to put priority in investing in America.
You're an asshole!
blog & fiction: jd87
Well you just can't expect any better from American laborers. Putting a complicated automated system like this in place in Germany or Japan would work great because the people there have honor and pride in what they do, and the laborers would be smart enough to load the machines correctly instead of either being lazy or being intentionally destructive and mishandling and misloading the luggage. You can't expect this in America these days. You can't even get the workers in McDonalds to get a simple order right any more; how can you expect people to load a machine correctly?
The problem is that you're expecting American laborers to follow their training and operate the machine correctly. This is folly. If this were Germany or Japan, that'd be a most reasonable expectation, because people there are competent and do things properly. Here in America, people are all fuckups. You can't even get the simplest thing done now by an American without them screwing it up somehow, either because they think it's funny, just don't care, or are incompetent. Ever try sending something fragile through UPS? Hope you didn't mark it "FRAGILE". They'll probably drive a truck over it to make sure it's broken.