Beyond Baggage

RFID tagging of ULDs and their contents is catching on. In 2006, a major airline used Motorola tags and readers in a successful test of air cargo tracking that generated 100 percent read rates at airports in Florida and Canada. Perhaps more importantly, the pilot showed that RFID transmissions didn’t interfere with normal operations.

Mobile technology for capturing and using the data on tags — such as wearable and hand-held readers linked wirelessly to enterprise management software — is one development that will speed the adoption of the use of RFID in air cargo. Due to the enhanced granularity and visibility of information generated by RFID tracking, its adoption is sure to spread, and may even become a value-added service that airports offer to cargo companies.

Aircraft turnaround
Airport turnaround times are a major concern for the industry. A recent study at the Institute for Manufacturing in Cambridge showed that the need for airlines to minimize costs and improve on-time departures is greater than ever: the average departure delay of aircraft is 17.4 minutes, which equates to departure delays of more than 605 hours (25 days) every year. The cost of UK departure delays in 2005 was more than £650 million (about $1.28 billion in today’s dollars).

The International Air Transport Association (IATA), together with SITA, is sponsoring a study to explore how RFID can improve turnaround times in order to reduce aircraft delays and, ultimately, costs.

Postal operations
Vacationers and business travelers alike may be surprised to learn that the U.S. Postal Service is commercial aviation’s largest customer. Each year seven leading U.S. carriers transport more than 450 million pounds of mail, driving more than $250 million in annual revenue.

Lost mail bothers people as much as lost baggage does. It also bothers the airlines — because if the mail is not appropriately tracked and doesn’t turn up where it’s supposed to arrive, they don’t get paid. The current system of tracking mail bags on commercial flights uses bar code scanning, and the Postal Service requires two or even three successful scans of each bag before it will pay for the shipment. A move to RFID, which can track multiple items in a single pass without individual line-of-sight scans, would increase the speed and accuracy of accounting for all that mail.

While a move to RFID in postal aviation would require approval from the postal service, this is a natural progression of technology, a factor that is likely to weigh positively for a service that has traditionally valued the use of technology in other parts of its operations.

Horizons for RFID
RFID is poised to spread through the aviation industry just as it has in manufacturing, retail, and other environments — but aviation presents special challenges.

Two of them — the regulatory environment in the industry and the physical environment of an aircraft in flight — go hand in hand. The FAA has approved the use of passive RFID tags while planes are on the ground, but active and battery-assisted tags remain off-limits, and no RFID system can be used when a plane is flying or even on a taxiway.

Boeing has conducted tests of active tags on aircraft, with promising results — the tags didn’t interfere with flight operations, and their longer read range meant that ground crews could scan locations throughout a plane without going inside, simply by opening one of the main hatches. If the FAA approves them for widespread use, active tags paired with temperature or other sensors could send real-time maintenance information to onboard wireless networks.

The physics of flight also involves shock, vibration, dirt, temperature extremes, and an abundance of metal — a surface that hasn’t always meshed well with RFID tagging. New tag technologies, including ceramic and metal-friendly mountings, will allow the technology to move past these hurdles.

RFID systems must also account for the diversity of operators in aviation. A single flight might involve an airline, an airport management organization, a cargo company, a catering company, the U.S. Postal Service, and other distinct entities. Some RFID systems may be specific to a single aircraft that will visit multiple locations; others will be keyed to a single airport campus that welcomes planes and cargo from around the world.