It's actually VERY cool to see that US Airways is adopting a system very similar to the one FedEx uses and has had since oh 1985 But hey better late than never.
Grocery stores were using bar code scanners even before that. What's your point?
Now, if they could just port that information over to CLP for the Weight & Balance closeout, things could run even smoother.
I asked the baggage guys a few weeks ago if the count was automatically sent to the computer. Answer? No, just tracking data.
Keep in mind that the scanner here is very much a work in progress, with software updates and modifications being regularly rolled out. We now have real-time tracking where when loading a flight we can see how many bags we still are waiting for, which flights they are coming off of, and the inbound gates and ETA's for those flights, or the times when they actually arrived; considering how they're now working the first software version we had seems primitive in hindsight.
I think one of their long term goals is to have a scanner interface that will allow the user to not just commit bag totals but also eventually everything else that's been loaded and close the flight out, but I don't know. Although it's working well now I have some gripes over how the scanning program was implemented but I'll digress.
As it is now, if the baggage handlers forget to run inside and input the bags-in-the-bin data, the plane will sit out on the taxiway, burning fuel and incurring delay, until the individual is found and the data put in the computer.
How often does this happen?
All the time.
Cheers.
Yes, it's the fault of the lazy and forgetful "baggage handler guys", sounds like you got the stats right at your fingertips. Good call. Yes, sometimes people forget to close out their flights. Sometimes Sabre acts up and locks you out. Sometimes you have to call one of the very friendly CLP folks in PIT to finalize the load. Sometimes this takes a while. It's a system involving human beings and machines and software made by human beings.
I can guarantee you the amount of fuel wasted waiting for closeout numbers is a slim fraction of the fuel wasted sitting in the holding pen for 40 minutes waiting for a gate.
I have proposed to management by using rampers on light duty to do nothing but scan tags, especially on the down load, as the scanners don't weight more than a few pounds, but so far I haven't seen this being done.
This happens from time to time.
Let's assume for the sake of discussion that your assertions are correct. Automating the tasks you mention would seem to be a logical extension of the current project.
There's only so much streamlining that can happen within this process, given the accuracy required for the load data there's always going to have be a human being needed to manually confirm the load data and close out the flight. As it is now we are instructed not to use the bag counts on the scanner when inputting loads into Sabre but to keep manual physical counts of all the bags. This infers that not all bags end up getting scanned, and this inference is accurate.
Anyone who has ever read a post by me KNOWS I have been a long standing and harsh critic of US Airways IT. This time around with a non moron at the top and a solid opps guy what I think you're seeing is a logical progression to integrate the all of the tasks. Usually the best way to do that with minimum disruption is to do it in stages.
Given the complexity of the systems involved, how they're expected to work together, how they're integrated into the operation, and indeed the size of the operation make it so that smaller, incremental changes are completely necessary.
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