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Finding Fault With Qantas' RFID Baggage Tracking System
lukehopewell1 writes "Australian airline giant Qantas has implemented new baggage tags powered by RFID technology. The RFID tag is encoded with the information on a passenger's boarding pass when placed in a bag drop area, and is summarily sent to its destination. But is it any good? ZDNet Australia tested the new systems and found that the system sadly had no intention of sending our cargo."
This seemed like a poor test to me, they tested a really small hand bag on a luggage system that normally handles well...luggage. Why not test it with suitcase or duffel bag?
So they use jars for luggage down under? That's not a bag, mate.
Great test of a system; Not. We have no idea if they actually placed the package in the correct area. "We test the system by sending a package" is not a study.
The airline employee couldn't get the airline system to accept the airline tag. Not just "three goes" but "every time tried" and just gave up. It's not like it worked the third time, but the airline employee admitted failure of the tagging system when it wouldn't work. It's not like it was done by a regular person who didn't get it to work. The people trained and paid to make the system work were unable to do so.
I wonder if it may have been because it was such a small bag and the bag didn't raise the tag high enough to be accurately read in the initial scan. Unfortunately, since they have the "automated" system run by airline employees, the guys trying couldn't get a chance to play with it at all to test anything like that themselves.
Learn to love Alaska
Normally, if the RFID part fails, the barcode scanner in the top can pick up the code on the back of the tag, so I'd say the guys in the video might have had a better experience if they'd just put an "Out of Service" tag on the broken kiosk and moved to the next one.
The biggest problem I've seen is that there's not enough information telling people new to the system what to do. Qantas put a number of staff around the kiosks to help, but better signs and directions would have been much smarter.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Perhaps they should have tried an actual normal bag?
They did. The jar was wrapped in bubble wrap, which was then zipped inside a small backpack/tote bag. While I'm sure that the producers were hoping for a bag of broken jar and loose M&Ms about which they could snark at the end of the segment, there wasn't anything freakishly bizarre about the bag that they tried to check.
The one thing that was a bit unusual was the size of the bag--it was quite a bit smaller than most checked bags or backpacks would be; certainly much smaller than the carry-on limits for any airline. I can see a parcel that size being checked only if the passenger had multiple carry-on-sized items and the airline was being particularly sticky about their carry-on bag count. Since the automated checking system incorporates sensors for bag weight and laser scanners to detect bag size, it may be that this particular item fell below the check-in system's minimum size thresholds. It couldn't tell the difference between this small bag and an empty bin, so sent the passenger to the regular, manual check-in rather than risking checking in an RFID tag without its attached luggage.
~Idarubicin