The announcement of the planned six month RFID pilot between BAA and Emirates has certainly gained a lot of headlines, which itself shows the potential of RFID to attract attention. But more questions still need to be asked about ths trial.
A number of airports around the world are already in the implementation phase of RFID. Hong Kong, Milan Malpensa and Las Vegas are well down the road. If this was a race, Hong Kong would be about to lap BAA. Milan Malpensa too is likely to be in full implementation by August, when the BAA trial is only due to end.
A couple of other things are worth asking. Would you not have expected a landmark RFID trial with BAA at Heathrow to have involved 'the world's favourite airline', rather than Emirates?
And with Terminal 5 due to open next month, wouldn't that have been an ideal opportunity for BA to use RFID? At the last count, BA was not going to use RFID in T5, but use 3D bar codes instead, because that had been proven to work at other airports.
BA may well use RFID in T5 at a later date, but it probably won't happen until later this year, at best. All of these baggage handling issues - and RFID's place in them - may become clearer, when a summit on baggage handling takes place in Milan at the end of the month.
In the meantime, despite the publicity of the trial and with increased competition looming from other European airports, some might say that BAA is behind, not ahead, of the RFID curve.
Comments (1)
I agree with your comments and would add that the airlines in the U.S. are still mired in muddy thinking that prevents them from taking bold action to reposition themselves in the world marketplace. VP's in several of the top US airlines will say that they have no or so little a problem with baggage that they are focused on other priorities. They have told this to my face even as their performance continues to decline.
Oh, the customer? Ah, they say, they don't care as long as they get a cheap ticket. The airlines and airports in the world that will take innovative action in the face of intransigence will be in Asia, Europe and the Middle East. I just came back from the Middle East and the commitment to RFID is clear. They are moving aggressively to do to the US Airline industry what Japan did to our automotive industry. Many of the current US airline executives won't be able to respond fast enough and so it goes...
Posted by John Shoemaker | February 15, 2008 10:47 PM
Posted on February 15, 2008 22:47