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Article: Every bag in place: the Las Vegas airport bets on radio waves.
- Article from:
- Mechanical Engineering-CIME
- Article date:
- April 1, 2004
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 American Society of Mechanical Engineers. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Passengers check more than 60,000 pieces of luggage at McCarran International, the Las Vegas airport, on an average day. Each airline is responsible for its passengers' baggage, and there are optical system; that read the bar codes on luggage tags to keep track of as many bags as possible. According to Samuel Ingalls, McCarran's information systems manager, an optical system is accurate about 90 percent of the time. Tags out of sight--say, under a suitcase--can't be read.
That leaves to chance more than 6,000 bags, many of which can wind up in the wrong place. Each misdirected bag has to be tracked down and delivered to the rightful owner. It's a necessary and ...