Finding Fault With Qantas' RFID Baggage Tracking System 106
lukehopewell1 writes "Australian airline giant Qantas has implemented new baggage tags powered by RFID technology. The RFID tag is encoded with the information on a passenger's boarding pass when placed in a bag drop area, and is summarily sent to its destination. But is it any good? ZDNet Australia tested the new systems and found that the system sadly had no intention of sending our cargo."
Sample size os one? (Score:4, Insightful)
Great test of a system; Not. We have no idea if they actually placed the package in the correct area. "We test the system by sending a package" is not a study.
Re:TL;DL (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps they should have tried an actual normal bag?
They did. The jar was wrapped in bubble wrap, which was then zipped inside a small backpack/tote bag. While I'm sure that the producers were hoping for a bag of broken jar and loose M&Ms about which they could snark at the end of the segment, there wasn't anything freakishly bizarre about the bag that they tried to check.
The one thing that was a bit unusual was the size of the bag--it was quite a bit smaller than most checked bags or backpacks would be; certainly much smaller than the carry-on limits for any airline. I can see a parcel that size being checked only if the passenger had multiple carry-on-sized items and the airline was being particularly sticky about their carry-on bag count. Since the automated checking system incorporates sensors for bag weight and laser scanners to detect bag size, it may be that this particular item fell below the check-in system's minimum size thresholds. It couldn't tell the difference between this small bag and an empty bin, so sent the passenger to the regular, manual check-in rather than risking checking in an RFID tag without its attached luggage.