British Airways is introducing autonomous baggage carts at its home airport, London Heathrow. The baggage carts are designed to reduce customer delays by optimising the baggage process.
British Airways deals with 75,000 bags a day! Obviously coordinating and getting the bags to where they need to be is gonna be a challenge. However, British Airways has a little trick up its sleeves to help simplify the process. That little trick is called automation.
Every bag at the airport carries a bag tag, this has a barcode on it so it can be tracked by the company, Airline, and the Customer. These then travel through the baggage system at the airport where they are loaded onto a cart to be delivered to the aircraft.
The operator of the baggage carts typically waits until all of the bags have arrived to save making multiple journeys. However, with each automated baggage cart, known as a dolly, able to operate independently, they can head to the appropriate aircraft as soon as each one is full.
These carts have memorized the layout of the airport so they will never get lost! Using artificial intelligence, they also work out which route would be quickest, rather than unnecessarily following a predetermined route.
These carts also are zero emission. While new technology is certainly exciting, it does raise a couple of concerns. The largest in this instance being safety while operating around aircraft.
Additionally, without a baggage container on top, the low to the ground vehicles could potentially be easily missed. As such, British Airways appears to be adopting unmissable no overtaking signs onboard the vehicles.
Not necessarily. The jobs you are talking about are already taken. Aurigo is the company behind this tech not British Airways. They are contractors who BA have picked. The jobs which will be lost are the handlers who were responsible for transporting the GSE.
Fair enough. However, I feel that BA can repurpose the workers as the AI bots replace them. It is quite possible they can be used for other jobs, such as aircraft maintenance, or the restocking of a plane’s AC, food, and drainage of waist.
It’s good, I mean lost bags are a big problem, and this could certainly help that, also as airports become more and more congested we need to look out for new and better things to move onto…
I understand that people might lose their jobs, but some people aren’t even motivated to do their job. I mean at EWR the people directing the plane look so bored of their job and don’t even speak about luggage being thrown. And yes, I have lost 2 luggage tags (you know the ones with your name and stuff) just because they threw them. I mean @JNG_Aviation loves his job from a video a long time ago and you always see those funny 10 second clips with people dancing and stuff and getting a laugh out of us.
So although some jobs will be lost, this expansion will cost a lot of money and it will just come down to the fact that this job could only be for people who love their job :)
Cool 😎! I love the idea of this for customers. However, to make customers happy people have to go. As a passenger in a terminal I see things moving around on it’s own? 🤔
