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McCarran Airport's IT department continues to push the envelope with a large-scale deployment of radio-frequency baggage ID tags By David Joachim
McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas is overhauling its baggage-handling systems to incorporate radio-frequency identification tags, a costly move that will help the facility keep up with federal security regulations and reduce occurrences of lost baggage.
McCarran is the first U.S. airport to commit to RFID on a large scale. Denver International Airport and Jacksonville (Fla.) Airport have started small RFID trials, but steep pricing for the nascent technology-as high as 70 cents per tag until recently-has relegated RFID to aviation science fiction. Now the cost is dropping as manufacturing, transportation and logistics companies begin to deploy the technology. By far the biggest booster has been Wal-Mart, which is requiring all its suppliers to affix RFID tags to their cartons and pallets by 2006.
At McCarran, a new conveyor with RFID readers will cost about $100 million to build. The tags-900-MHz chips that store information about each unit to which they're affixed-will cost $25 million, or 25 cents each, says Sam Ingalls, McCarran's IS director.
McCarran is uniquely suited among airports to test RFID. Because almost all its flight-information, baggage-handling and check-in systems are "common use" equipment, the airport's IT department can coordinate such a project across the entire facility. In most other U.S. airports, the airlines choose and manage their own IT (see "Air Power," April 17, 2003, ID# 1407f1).
"This is much more difficult to do when you have seven different baggage-handling systems," says Dick Marchi, senior vice president for technical and environmental affairs at Airports Council International, an airport trade association. Most baggage-handling systems aren't highly automated, Marchi says, perhaps explaining why bags are so often lost.
It may also explain why the TSA (Transportation Security Administration) is footing about $95 million of the bill for McCarran's project.
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