Recently, I went on a tour of the American Airlines operations facilities at Boston’s Logan airport.
We went behind the counter to see offices, then downstairs to the baggage handling area. It pretty much met my expectations; its a small conveyor maze with automatic scanners that read your bag tag then arms that push your bag down a path, then on to one of those motorized carts to go to your plane’s gate. Each airline has one of these getups (and associated TSA scanners for checked baggage) at their console(s). That equals many of these, owned by each airline, at each airport.
We were also able to see their ops center that figures out which plane will go to each gate, redirecting planes that are late, etc. Not the same as air traffic control, but seemed like a similar idea except they looked at customer satisfaction and on-time planes.
There were certainly a few areas for ops improvement, particularly around the efficiency of checked bag screening (efficiency, not quality!!) and I was surprised at how manual many things were while the baggage carousel was very automated.
Miss Johanna did a nice job of taking pictures:
http://johanna-lgo.blogspot.com/2010/04/it-really-is-miracle-that-checked-bag.html
