Isom and PHL

[USstew23]

You are not seriously going to compare gate agents or rampers to Drs & Lawyers? These are jobs that are steping stones, not a career, your expectations (and the unions) are all wrong! No one thinks a MC Donalds drive through clerk should be a career (but a superviosr or manager job might be), why are similar entry level jobs in the airline indistry thought of as a job for life?

Uh excuse me you absolute FOOL!!! I'm not sure what loser planet that you come from but the agents on the East used to make a decent wage that was livable and they had good reason for sticking with it, it was not a stepping stone and as you can see from most of the legacy carriers (ie not AWA) the agents have been around longer than some of us have been alive which is probably a good reason that before this new way of doing things (wanting to pay people $7.00/hr) that airlines ran like clockwork.

I want to apologize to those former AWA employees who have managed to stick it out because this is not a jab at you. UPNAWAY, this is why so many people on the East do not have any respect for those former AWA employees because of this kind of stuff. If you don't like it then you need to move on UPNAWAY because these people are going to continue to fight back until they are given some fraction of a livable wage. Alot of the problem in PHL is that you get what you pay for, it makes me angry when they're lazy too but the change needs to come from the top and until they truly care then well we're screwed.

 

[N965VJ]

Considering that the two recent appointments to the senior IT management positions both came from Motorola, you may not be too far from the mark. <_<

That’s exactly what I was thinking.

Motorola makes some good products. I’ve been using a Motorola Q as a secondary cell phone/PDA since early last summer. But what makes it not a great product is the OS.

I have no idea what would be needed to make a handheld device useful on the ramp, but if some of the Young Turks in IT toe the Tempe line in cheap, I would expect nothing more than mediocrity.

 

[perserverance]

I just heard that one of the ideas PHL is toying with to alleviate the baggage
flowing out of Customs is to divert a belt over to A-West Bag Chute and have
some bags x-rayed there...UUUgggHHH !!

This will collapse the A-West sysem. The current system runs on a wing and a prayer.
The bag chute / jammers and control room leads keep it running now ,but with a number
of problems, they are constantly repairing them. Now they want to add 11 more flights and maybe
some domestic connections from Customs. It will not hold it. The Int'l operation outbound will
fail if this is implemented. The bagchute will be handling the outbound luggage at the same time they
want to send over domestics from Customs and take one of the Int'l carrousels, They only have 5
now and would fall to 4 with an increase of 11 to 13 more flights, Internationally. Not good.

One of the problems as I see it is that the company puts all these inbounds arriving in
PHL all between basically 1400 / 1630. Thats' gonna be around 17 or so flights in the summer.
They rely heavily on the 1700 / 1830 connection times. They need to spread out the arrivals
despite the connections. It may be the only way to keep from failing. Some connections will have
to fall to later times or God Forbid early the next morning....Welcome to Philadelphia, Stay a Night !!
(whether you like it or not ). *** new slogan***

Remember that also at this time BA has an arrival along with AF and LH. So add three more, not
counting are island flights yet which may be as many as 13 or more.


Thanks

 

[Dog Wonder]

We have been scanning mail for 3 or 4 years.

Why are customer's bags less important than mail?

 

[Jester]

We have been scanning mail for 3 or 4 years.

Why are customer's bags less important than mail?

Where do you scan them? Planeside if you have the time or take them back to mail point and do it in a timely and orderly fashion and wait for the next convenient out-bound flight? CONX runners don't have that luxury as the bags are being slammed down the belt with hot connects, especially as bags are nearly always much heavier than a mail flats.

The scanner would be a nifty idea if one didn't need to try to hold it in the bin while tossing bags out the door. If people think it is easy, just find a stapler, hold it in your hand and then try to remove the kitchen trash and do that about 100 times in 15 minutes. Scanning would greatly slow down the process of moving bags.

Simply Jester.

 

[freedom]

So then that begs the question, WHY since it's so easy are you not a real estate agent or lawyer. I've seen people with advanced degrees do so poorly on the LSAT that they never even tried again.



Nice attitude! Bite the hand that feeds you. Clearly one of the sharper knives in the drawer NOT!

i haven't taken the LSAT yet , and i haven't started studying law at this point either , i just can't see it being all that hard .



Sorry bob , it’s not personal , I’ve simply learned from the best , and that’s the us airways management team . The only thing they care about is the bottom line , so the most effective way to bring about change is to absolutely bite the hand that feeds you . I spent time debating the morality of punishing the passengers in order to pursue our goals , and I’ve decided as that we really don’t have any other options left to us , it’s justifiable , you know , the ends justify the means .


Is that a horrible statement to make ? well yes it surely is , can I sleep at night soundly ?I absolutely can .

 

[Hadenough]

We have been using scanners in CLT for a number of years. They are used in the bagroom to scan the LGW and FRA bags. I don't know if they are used on other flights or at reroute. I have never worked in the "dungeon". I have delivered bags to them and I see one person scanning and another loading pods.

 

[BoeingBoy]

The company now wants them to scan the bag(mind you the belt is still moving) put the scanner down , pick up the bag and place it in a tug.

That sums it up. To put some numbers to it, say a baggage handler, after a little practice, can whip out the scanner, scan a bag, and "holster" the scanner in 5 seconds. Multiply that by 100 bags for a flight and it's 500 seconds - 8-1/3 minutes of extra time to put the bags on a cart. The cart gets to the airplane and it's another 8-1/3 minutes of scanning bags - now we're up to almost 17 minutes. Multiply that by 400-500 mainline flights a day in PHL/CLT (arrivals plus departures) and you're up to well over 100 hours/day of extra time spent handling baggage.

Are they going to provide the extra people necessary to perform that 100+ hours per day of extra work? Or is it going to result in more misconnected baggage?

Jim

 

[700UW]

Fedex pre-loads the containers before they put them on an airplane.

They are sorted automatically then sent to the proper container, the dont transfer packages like bags, it is all done automatically.

Then the containers are brought to the airport, except thier hubs which have the sorting center all ready there, but like I said, the containers are pre-loaded then trucked to the plane and then loaded.

No scanning is done ramp side.

You cant compare FedEx to an airline.

There is not an efficient way to scan every bag as it is loaded onto an airplane.

The only plane that is pre-loaded is the widebodies and that is only originating luggage, not connecting luggage as that is done ramp side.

Wouldnt RFID Technology be better for an airline?

Delta Plans U.S.-Wide RFID System

The airline carrier will spend up to $25 million during the next two years to roll out an RFID baggage-handling system at every U.S. airport it serves.

By Jonathan Collins

July 2, 2004—Building on two RFID trials it carried out within in the past nine months, Delta Air Lines has committed to spending up to $25 million during the next two years to roll out an RFID system to track all the luggage it handles at U.S. airports.

Delta plans to use disposable RFID baggage tags that will be attached to passenger luggage at check-in at every U.S. airport it serves. Those labels will enable Delta to track each item throughout the carrier’s baggage-sorting operation and onto the plane, then through any transfer airports for connecting flights and finally onto the baggage carousel at the passenger destination.

“With RFID we can know exactly where a bag is, and that’s very powerful information. We obviously track our aircraft, and we know where our passengers are, but the missing link has been with baggage. Adding RFID to baggage means we will have full visibility into all our operations,” said Jim Logue, systems manager for ramp and baggage strategy development at Delta Air Lines, to attendees at the Global Aviation RFID Forum in June. Logue was speaking at a presentation that detailed the company’s two RFID pilots.

The key motivation behind deploying RFID across its baggage operations is financial, although the company believes it will also improve customer service. Delta estimates that only 0.7 percent of the bags it handles every year gets lost, but finding those 800,000 or so misplaced bags and returning them to their owners cost the company close to $100 million a year. Given that the RFID baggage-tracking system is expected to cost between $15 million and $25 million to deploy, the company expects to quickly recoup its investment.

Delta says that it has yet to determine which vendors and RFID equipment it will use for its planned RFID system, but that it will issue its technical requirements in a request for proposal (RFP) for interested RFID hardware and services vendors later this year. In the two RFID pilots carried out by Delta at Florida’s Jacksonville Airport in October 2003 and May 2004, the company says it used a variety of hardware vendors’ equipment.

Although Delta is committed to supporting EPCglobal standards, last month Delta and United Airlines made a joint proposal to the International Air Transport Association (ITAT) regarding RFID data specifications for baggage. Delta says it needs to ensure that its system does not also read EPC tags placed on items for use in, for example, the Wal-Mart supply chain.

The joint proposal from the two air carriers allows for either writing flight information to the tag attached to an item of luggage or associating a tag’s unique serial number with the flight and passenger information for that item to which it is attached. Delta expects to associate information with a tag’s serial number rather than write to the tag. “We learned from the Jacksonville pilot that we don’t need to write to each tag. Association works just as well,” says Logue.

Despite years of trying improving the quality of its baggage-handling systems, Logue maintains that the performance of its current system, which uses bar code labels, has “flat-lined” out, with bar-coded labels being successfully read by scanners only 85 percent of the time. Logue expects RFID to deliver read rates very close to 100 percent.

In addition, because RFID is a hands-free technology, the company believes that its new system will not only be able to track baggage automatically as it passes RFID readers but it will also free baggage handlers from having to take the time to use handheld bar code readers.

In Delta’s two RFID trials, UHF RFID inlays were added to the company’s existing baggage labels. Those labels were fixed to checked-in luggage on the airline’s Jacksonville-to-Atlanta route. RFID antennas were placed throughout baggage conveyor system, with RFID readers also reading tags as bags were loaded and unloaded from the unit load devices (ULD)—large containers that are loaded onto the plane.

According to Logue, the trials were essential to finding out if RFID tags would be robust enough to survive the baggage-sorting process. During the trials, Delta saw tag antennas destroyed by static electricity on its conveyor systems. “We learned a lot, and we learned it’s not simple,” says Logue.

Airline companies are not alone in looking to RFID to improve the ability to track baggage. Both McCarran Airport in Las Vegas and the Hong Kong International Airport have announced plans to use Matrics RFID tags and readers for their planned baggage-handling systems.

 

[BoeingBoy]

The other operational question is how many times do you scan and where in the workflow do you capture the data?

Bob, I have no idea what they actually plan but the ideal would be to scan at every point a bag "changes hands". For example, to use a routine passenger itinerary of a 1-connection flight, you'd scan at:
- point of bag check
- loading on cart in bag room of terminal
- loading on flight at origination
- offloading from flight at connecting point
- loading on outbound flight at connecting point
- offloading from flight at destination
- putting on baggage claim belt

Ideally, the scanners would have the capability to alert the fleet service folks of an error - the bag being loaded on the wrong flight, for example.

Jim

 

[JoeDirt]

700
All the FRA and LGW bags are scanned in CLT and then loaded into containers and taken plane side. Transfers and local checked are all scanned in the bag room. No scanning plane side.

 

[700UW]

I knew they were not scanned plane side, I must have mistaken late bags for ABR.

I worked International all the time when I was utility, International Poopie Service, LOL!

 

[perserverance]

Well they were back in Customs again today looking at the Recheck Area and I've
been told ''It is going to fail !! ''

Management asked the engineers if something could be constructed to help and were
told yes, but it would take 18 to 24 months to run new wiring and structures that length.
Management asked ,''What could be done in 3 months ?''.....thier still waiting for an answer.

..............still waiting


Thanks

 

[BobbyBuckInAtlanta]

Becuase they are all brained washed, union babies! These people are worse than a scorened women they will never "get over it". The company should have changed the airlines name and made it absolutely clear this is a new company and if you do not like it leave! I would make everyone re-apply for their job at this point to try and clean up this mess! And just FYI when non-reaving out there gate agents do not make a point of telling every non rev how long you have been there. 20, 30 40 years does not impress me, it only makes me think what kind of looser is a gate agent for 40 years!

Let me guess, you've been employed here 6 monthe and want the benifits of 20 + years service. You are absolutely PATHETIC. To call an employee who has invested 40 years of their life into what used to be a wonderful carrer a losser, i'm at a loss for words. When i was hired 21 years ago, i looked up to those who had tenure over me not only for advice and guidence in my job, but life in general. WHAT I CAN GUARENTEE, IS THEY HAVE ***** NO INTEREST IN IMPRESSING A LOOSER LIKE YOUT SELF**** Who was probabley hired without even an interview, say over the phone..LOL..unlike your senior elders who beat out THOUSANDS of applicants for a few positions. YOU INGRATEFULL BRAT