Alaska Airlines: 20-Minute Baggage Process

Alaska Airlines is unique among the nine major U.S. carriers not only for its
extensive flight coverage of remote towns throughout Alaska (it also covers the U.S.,
Hawaii, and Mexico from its primary hub in Seattle). It is also one of the smallest
independent airlines, with 10,300 employees, including 3,000 flight attendants and
1,500 pilots. What makes it really unique, though, is its ability to build state-of- the-art
processes, using the latest technology, that yield high customer satisfaction. Indeed, J. D.
Power and Associates has ranked Alaska Airlines highest in North America for seven
years in a row for customer satisfaction. Alaska Airlines was the first to sell tickets via
the Internet, first to offer Web check-in and print boarding passes online, and first with
kiosk check-in. As Wayne Newton, Director of System Operation Control, states, “We are
passionate about our processes.
If it’s not measured, it’s not managed.” One of the processes Alaska is most proud
of is its baggage handling system. Passengers can check in at kiosks, tag their own bags
with bar code stickers, and deliver them to a customer service agent at the carousel,
which carries the bags through the vast underground system that eventually delivers
the bags to a baggage handler. En route, each bag passes through TSA automated
screening and is manually opened or inspected if it appears suspicious. With the help of
bar code readers, conveyer belts automatically sort and transfer bags to their location
(called a “pier”) at the tarmac level. A baggage handler then loads the bags onto a cart
and takes it to the plane for loading by the ramp team waiting inside the cargo hold.
There are different procedures for “hot bags” (bags that have less than 30 minutes
between transfer) and for “cold bags” (bags with over 60 minutes between plane
transfers). Hot bags are delivered directly from one plane to another (called “tail-to-
tail”). Cold bags are sent back into the normal conveyer system. The process continues
on the destination side with Alaska’s unique guarantee that customer luggage will be
delivered to the terminal’s carousel within 20 minutes of the plane’s arrival at the gate.
If not, Alaska grants each passenger a 2,000 frequent-flier mile bonus!
The airline’s use of technology includes bar code scanners to check in the bag
when a passenger arrives, and again before it is placed on the cart to the plane.
Similarly, on arrival, the time the passenger door opens is electronically noted and bags
are again scanned as they are placed on the baggage carousel at the destination—
tracking this metric means that the “time to carousel” (TTC) deadline is seldom missed.
And the process almost guarantees that the lost bag rate approaches zero. On a recent
day, only one out of 100 flights missed the TTC mark. The baggage process relies not
just on technology, though. There are detailed, documented procedures to ensure that
bags hit the 20- minute timeframe. Within one minute of the plane door opening at the
gate, baggage handlers must begin the unloading. The first bag must be out of the plane
within three minutes of parking the plane. This means the ground crew must be in the
proper location—with their trucks and ramps in place and ready to go. Largely because
of technology, flying on Alaska Airlines is remarkably reliable—even in the dead of an
Alaska winter with only two hours of daylight, 50 mph winds, slippery runways, and
low visibility. Alaska Airlines has had the industry’s best on-time performance, with
87% if its flights landing on time.
1. Prepare a flowchart of the process a passenger’s bag follows from kiosk to
destination carousel. (See Example 2 in Chapter 6 for a sample flowchart.) Include
the exception process for the TSA opening of selected bags.

Steps:

1. Baggage check-in at kiosk.

2. Tag own baggage with bar code stickers.
3. Deliver baggage to customer service agent at the carousel.
4. Scan through TSA automated system:
(a) Pass scan, conveyer belts automatically sent and transfer baggage to their
locations.
(b) Fail scan, baggage will be manually open or inspect if found suspicious.
5. Baggage handler loads the baggage onto a cart and take it to the plane.
6. Baggage load up by the ramp team waiting inside the cargo hold.
(a) Hot bags: Delivered directly from one plane to another (tail-to-tail).
(b) Cold bags: Sent back into the normal conveyer system.
7. Baggage deliver to the terminal’s carousel within 20 minutes of the plane arrival
at the gate.

Flowcharts of 20 minutes baggage handling system:

a a
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
b b
2. What other processes can an airline examine? Why is each important?

Nowadays, almost every airline companies in this world adopted the same process
just like what Alaska Airlines implemented including purchase flight ticket via online, offer
web check-in and print boarding passes online as well as kiosk check-in. However, the
competitiveness for airline industry is getting tight day by day and there is no doubt that the
process is changing and will continue to change. There are some new process that airline
must be examine to meet changing requirements related to capacity, environmental effects,
consumer satisfaction, safety, and security, while meeting ongoing requirements for the
economic viability of service providers.

From my perspective, operational concepts of airline companies is the crucial process

that needs to be re-examine. Operational concepts can be used to describe how the air
transportation system might advance, from the reasonable certainty of near-term
requirements, technologies, and schedule implementation to a less certain vision of the long-
term future. This process is important as it provides an opportunity to achieve national
consensus among the various agencies and stakeholders at a level of detail that permits more
focused agreement and planning. The salutary effect of this unifying activity is that it can
stimulate and guide research in both technical and nontechnical areas.

The first attribute is that the future airline system will involve much more automation
both on the ground and in the air. Since many modern aircraft are already so highly
automated that, once programmed by the pilots, the aircraft itself can perform the guidance,
navigation, and control tasks autonomously. This automated capability would need to be
enhanced, however, to fit into many future operational concepts that require new functions
for example required time of arrival at fixes, self-spacing and self-separation. The modern air
traffic control and management system is not highly automated, and it may prove nearly
impossible to develop and test the underlying algorithms for fully automatic control in all
situations, especially in the face of disruptions and emergencies. The same is generally true
for airline operations centres. Therefore, some functions may be fully automated like aircraft
guidance, others may be supported via automated decision aids such as controller decision
aids, automated monitoring and alerting systems. Still, others may rely on human decision
making while using information systems for communications, visualization and situation
assessment, and prediction of future conditions. The automation of many of these functions
requires continued for further research and development.

Secondly, human integrated process is consider part of the future air transportation
system until the day when the system can be automated to the extent that it requires neither
intervention nor monitoring. Rather than arguing the matter of “human versus machine”,
emphasis should be placed on creating synergy between humans and machines. Automation
design often appears to be driven by technological capability with either sufficient insight
into its functioning within the larger system or the ability to predict commensurate changes in
coordination between system elements and the training required of human operators.
Automation must be demonstrated to work with humans in the larger context of system
performance in both nominal and off-nominal conditions. Additionally, the humans in the
system process will also require coherent procedures and training designed in concert with
the technology.

Third, aircraft separation standards that limit system capacity will need to be reduced.
Current separation standards were based on system shortcomings that future technologies
may address and some of these factors are related to aircraft design. The factors relevant to
air traffic management technologies include errors in control and knowledge of aircraft
position, which might be reduced or functionally eliminated by ubiquitous and transparent
communication, navigation, and surveillance technologies. Despite this factor, lack of
situation awareness, especially with regard to current and future separation, which might be
mitigated by improved sensors and displays such as synthetic vision, cockpit display of traffic
information, and controller displays. Advanced technologies in both areas could produce a lot
of benefits, hence it is important to re-examine.

3. How does the kiosk alter the check-in process?

Kiosks have become a permanent fixture in airport terminals across all over the world
over the last decade. As passengers show an increasing willingness to embrace online and
mobile technology to check-in for their flight and retrieve their boarding pass, a self-service
mechanism called kiosk has emerged. Kiosks allows the processing of a significant number
of passengers to be decentralised from the airport itself. This allows a better use of airport
staff resources and reduces bottlenecks while, more significantly allowing more passenger’s
baggage check-in to be processed.

Kiosks has giving a lot of advantage to airline industry. For passengers, using kiosk
services can save time as there should be less queuing at the airport during the check-in
process. The self check-in service provides more personal control as passenger can see the
aircraft layout and choose their own seat from those available. For airport itself, obviously
kiosk can save space as airlines should need less desk space. Additionally, there will be more
retail opportunities and better customer facilities by making better use of the free desk space
even possible to postpone the need to build extra terminal space which result in saving a lot
of cost.

4. What metrics (quantifiable measures) are needed to track baggage?

Since Alaska Airlines has a policy that bags must be delivered to the carousel within
20 minutes after the airplane door opens at the gate, if not, affected passengers will
receive some kind of compensation in the form of bonus frequent flyer miles. So the
metric use must be clearly shows the time for baggage from arrival to carousel. Hence, so
the most relevant metric used by airline companies will be the percentage (%) of bags
delivered to proper destination on the same plane as the passenger. Others include the
percentage (%) of damage claimed for checked baggage. By using these metrics, not only
the airline companies able to track the passenger’s baggage but for able to give a further
insight study for future improvement.

5. What is the role of scanners in the baggage process?

The scanner often used in the airport are called computer tomography (CT) scanner. It
is a some kind of hollow tube that surround the passenger’s baggage.  The X-ray inside this
mechanism revolves slowly around it, bombarding it with X-rays and recording the resulting
data. The CT scanner uses all of this data to create a very detailed tomogram of the bag. The
scanner is able to calculate the mass and density of individual objects in the baggage based on
this tomogram. If an object's mass/density falls within the range of a dangerous material, the
CT scanner warns the operator of a potential hazardous object.