Slashdot Mirror
Delta Now Lets You Track Your Baggage In Real-Time (thenextweb.com)
Let's face it, tracking down a lost bag at the airport is a pain-in-the-ass. While airlines will often compensate you with money and new clothes for your troubles, the experience is certainly not pleasant. Delta is now attempting to further reduce the number of lost bags through its real-time luggage tracker in the latest version of its mobile app. The Next Web reports: The feature apparently cost $50 million to build. It allows you to see where your stuff is -- provided that it's at one of the 84 airports that support Delta's new tracking tech. Here's how it works. All bags will get a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tag. This allows Delta to track them in real-time using radio waves. Scanners positioned throughout the baggage system will allow Delta to monitor where the bag is, and relay that information to the passenger. Delta has traditionally been one of the best airlines when it comes to handling baggage. During 2012, it lost only 200,000 bags. That sounds like a lot, but bear in mind it carried 98 million passengers during the same period. You can try the feature on your next Delta flight by grabbing the app from Google Play and the App Store.
My bag is stuck in the cargo hold on the very plane I'm always sitting on... An obsolete md88 with misc broken shit that results in a cancelled flight
Your plane is headed to a vacation dreamland, your rfid tagged bags are headed to Minsk.YAY!
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
the last six times I flew with this, this would be great. BTW, all four times were at Detroit where they are required to hire criminals to handle baggage.
I work at DTW. The courts ruled because we couldn't find enough African-Americans without criminal records that we had to hire ones with or we were racist. That is why the TSA and baggage workers here are so slow and so much ends up missing. That is better than being racist with our hiring.
Delta's new luggage ticking system is made possible by Microsoft Surface Pro 4. Said one customer - "I love the Surface Pro 4 from Microsoft. Every second counts and having Microsoft Surface technology in airports allows passengers and airline staff to analyze the location of luggage in almost real time."
#DeleteChrome
Your bag is... sporting someone else's RFID tag.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Are you are saying criminal is a race?
Thanks Snowflake. You apparently don't even understand the words you use - that's a consequence of newspeak. It appears to be working.
At $30/leg they can damn well provide fedex level tracking. I don't care if they have to wrap the case in barcode tape.
So why not put the criminal employees in public areas where they can't easily ransack suitcases?
... that wanted to be part of a mindless system oppressing their black brothers, you mean. Although in this case, it's the African-Americans being racist because everyone feels oppressed by body scanners.
A man walks up to the baggage counter in an airport with 3 suitcases. he says to the attendant, "I'd like this bag sent to Moscow, this one to London, and this one to Chicago. I myself am travelling to San Francisco."
"I'm sorry sir, we have to send all your bags to the same destination as you are travelling to. We are unable to do as you request."
"Why not???", demands the man angrily. "That's what you did last time!"
If rump becomes our next ruler, expect background checks for jobs to be legalized.
No, but the police infairly arrest minorities more often so requiring clean records is racist.
This is the next wave of productivity gains. All those little things we spend time and money on add up. Sure, this is a small thing, but it's one less thing we'll be spending time on as the process is improved by tech.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Will you literally be able to track your bag accurately through the airport or will it be generic "stations" like "ticketing, tram loading, tarmac, plane"?
Either way, I'm curious about what TSA thinks about this. In theory this gives parties with ill intent some kind of idea where bags go and when and could used for nefarious purposes.
On the up side, if your bag stalls it may be a sign you're being robbed or TSA is detailing the contents (or both!).
center and arrive at a city center with my suitcase in the same train car.
And no need of x-rays, body searches, waiting in lines before security and passport controls, taxi drivers, cosmetics thrown to garbage, etc. Take with you about whatever you want and as much as you want.
Just make a normal working WiFi in trains. Still in 19th century there was a direct train from Saint Petersburg to Nice via Vienna. Nowadays despite a lot of talking about European Union Association for such countries as Ukraine, it is not possible to go by train from Vienna to Kiev directly. The same as during the Cold War, nothing changed.
Why not fly an airline you can depend on not to lose your bags. Perhaps Delta should have invested money in internal baggage tracking instead.
07:00 New York
08:20 Bermuda
13:15 West France
15:20 Moscow
19:35 Australia
22:40 Antarctica
23:55 Hellifweknow
Table-ized A.I.
That seems to be the case, but how does my luggage going missing help against the police being racist?
Had this almost a decade ago.
Don't expect luggage to arrive!
I'll show myself out...
During 2012, it lost only 200,000 bags. That sounds like a lot, but bear in mind it carried 98 million passengers during the same period.
That sounds like a lot, and it doesn't say much if we don't know how many passengers actually checked their luggage in.
Based on my travel habits, I would say that I check a luggage about 20% of the time - I travel mainly for business. If we assume that it is a typical pattern, that means that Delta lost 200,000 bags out of 20 million passengers with checked luggage, or 1%. It just doesn't sound like a lot, it actually IS a lot.
Travel advice: if you check in a luggage, pack some clean underwear in your carry-on. You will be glad to have them if your bag is missing at your destination...
It's nice to be able to see if your bag is on the plane.
But sometimes stuff happens and it wont get on your plane.
But I can just imagine how some passenger will react when they start push back. And they can see that there bag is not on the plane.
Nice feature for the passenger. But hell for the crew.
> So why not put the criminal employees in public areas where they can't easily ransack suitcases?
RACIST!
But here's a novel idea for the airlines: how about fewer bells and whistles, and lower fares?
I took a trip 6 months ago and was able to use the Delta app to see updates on my bag status. It wasn't super granular - "bag checked in", "bag on plane ###", "bag on carousel" - but it was enough for me to know whether or not my bag was going to make my connection.
The big improvement here is that they're using RFID instead of relying on the baggage handler to scan the bar code.
I've been doing it for years with cheap gadgets from AliExpress. You can even listen to what is said around the bagage.
So that they would know where our bags were instead of making us wait 3 full days in Japan without them.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
I wonder how many people will forget to remove it after their flights? Not that there's anything wrong with having a passive tracker on your luggage.
Best Slashdot Co
How many passengers did it lose during that period?
So, I wonder how long it will take before Delta is actively blocking competing technologies (Tile, etc.).
All it would take is a decent lobbying force to convince ignorant lawmakers that someone else's RFID solution is "interfering" with their ability to rip off the customer for a service they should be providing in the first place to mitigate the losses their current tracking systems cause every day.
"You can try the feature on your next Delta flight by grabbing the app from Google Play and the App Store."
However, the technology will not yet support tracking your baggage while it's in the plane, even when the plane is delayed and sitting on the tarmac for 2-6 hours, with you and your luggage trapped inside. Delta plans to roll this out as a premium feature later next year.
Don Head
UNIX/Linux Administrator
So if I'm travelling through Denver, does this mean I can watch my bag slamming into all the other bags in real time?
My bags are on a flight to Alaska. Customer service, Doh.
What a waste of time.
DL has had this for YEARS. Just because you as a consumer didn't see it, didn't meant that it wasn't in the backend. Even today, there is tons of information that you as the customer cannot see. Back in 2013? They added baggage tracking to the app, but it didn't show it on a PRETTY PICTURE!!"
You won't be able to see when they store it in cold storage. You won't see which sort belt it went thru. You won't see what TSA belt it rode on. You won't see when it gets reticketed because you got changed.
That's all stuff we could see back in 2012... with bar codes and batch scanners.
This article is a puff piece right before the peak traveling season of the year... to get the brand in your head. RFID was being installed and used in the system a year ago. When I quit, we already had the RFID printers and scanners. They upgraded our hand scanners to cellular scanners (still just using the bar code, not the RFID).. and that's it.
This article should be titled "Delta invests in technology on the backend so that they dont lose your bags nearly as much". Doesn't sound as titillating as "YOU CAN TRACK IT REAL TIME (even though you could years ago) on APPY APP!!!"
Now I'll know from the tarmac the exact moment my luggage hits the river!
Will this generate more anxiety than the current process involving Schrödinger's luggage carousel? It least this way I can ignore the state of my luggage until the moment I'm suppose to get it, and not fret about it during the entire flight -- should I actually notice something going wrong.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Paid $50 last time just to check ONE bag. Don't fly very often ( prefer to drive when possible ).
Not worth flying Delta if you have to check luggage.
But if it doesn't help catch the person/people stealing things out of my bags it really isn't that useful.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Windows Mobile community when IDC confirmed that Windows Mobile market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming close on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Windows Mobile has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Windows Mobile is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Windows Mobile's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Windows Mobile faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Windows Mobile because Windows Mobile is dying. Things are looking very bad for Windows Mobile. As many of us are already aware, Windows Mobile continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
WinCE is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: WinCE is dying.
All major surveys show that Windows Mobile has steadily declined in market share. Windows Mobile is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Windows Mobile is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. Windows Mobile continues to decay. Nothing short of a cockeyed miracle could save Windows Mobile from its fate at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Windows Mobile is dead.
Fact: Windows Mobile is dying
Furries make the internet go.
wtf.... being arrested doesn't give you a criminal record. Being convicted does. I know of no large employers who wouldn't hire someone who had been arrested and then cleared. Being arrested and then convicted? Sure...
Now they will KNOW when to detonate their next shoe bomb!
No, arrest records are also available to employers
It's why they make you sign the "investigation release" form on your application.