Yesterday, I attended the official launch of a new inline baggage screening system in Delta’s Terminal 5 at LAX. After taking the tour, it dawned on me that a lot of people probably don’t know what happens to their bags after they kiss them goodbye. So, let’s talk about it.

But first, let’s talk about what inline baggage screening is. You know when you go to a ticket counter, check bags, and then find out you have to drag your bags over to another place where they’ll screen them? That’s the old-school stopgap way of handling screening. Once the rules came out requiring 100 percent screening of all passenger bags, airports had to figure out how to shoehorn these massive machines into the existing baggage systems which were in no way designed for them. The easiest way was to simply plop a machine down in the ticketing lobby and make everyone drop their bags there. Then the bags would enter the system. This sucks for three big reasons.

1. Those machines take up a lot of space and make for some cramped quarters in an already crowded ticketing area.
2. It’s a real pain to drag your bags from the ticket counter back to the scanning machines and then wait in another line if a lot of people are there.
3. It’s a really slow process to do it all manually.

As you can see below, the first and second problems are solved with inline bag screening. This view of Delta’s ticket counter at LAX was cluttered with CTX screening machines and now it’s much more open.

For those reasons, many airports have gone toward inline baggage scanning systems. These systems have traditionally been installed into the existing baggage system. So they shut down the system, stick some machines in there and then turn things back on. You might think this sounds easy, but it’s painful. These are usually pretty expensive and can take a couple years to install. This new system that was designed by Siemens acts a bit differently.

Instead of sticking the system into the existing framework, they build a new structure that contains all the bag screening equipment. Then they just divert the bags from the existing system into the new one for screening and then it goes right back into the existing system. In this case, they say it’s half the price of another system (this was $30 million) and it took “only” nine months. If you notice a new bulge on top of Delta’s Terminal 5 at LAX, that’s the new system. They just built it on top of the existing structure. At right in the picture below, you can see the ramp that was built to connect the existing systems to the new screening area.

Now, what happens to your bag? When you check it, the bag runs down belts into the baggage system. The first stop is the big CTX screening machines. There are four of these in Delta’s terminal at LAX. Once in the machine, a decision is made on whether there’s something potentially harmful in the bag or not using automation. If it’s not deemed harmful, the bag moves along. If there is a red flag, then the image is thrown up on a screen where a TSA agent decides whether or not it’s actually a threat. If there’s any question about it, the bag is sent to a TSA agent for a search.

After the security work is done, the bag goes back into the baggage system where it is then sorted so that it goes to the correct flight. In more sophisticated systems, there are a number of scanners that look at the bag tags and automatically decide at which gate the bag needs to be. I’m told they have over a 90 percent success rate in this terminal when it comes to reading the tags in Terminal 5 at LAX. Other places have a manual process for getting bags to the right airplane. Once at the gate, it’s loaded on the airplane and then it joins you on the flight to wherever you’re headed.

This sounds pretty easy, but there are a million exceptions. Oversized bags don’t fit on the belts, so they have a different process. Then, of course, there are connecting bags from Delta and from other airlines. Add mail and cargo to the mix and you’ve got a incredibly complex system.

Last night, I attended the launch of Iberia’s new flight from LA to Madrid. This has been hailed as a product of the joint venture between British Airways/Iberia (now under the same ownership) and American Airlines. Is that really true? Yes and no, I think. It’s confusing.

One of the things that bothers me about joint ventures in general is that they are given a lot more credit than they’re actually due. The basic joint venture idea is that airlines come together to create a single business where all decisions are made to benefit the greater good and information flows freely. The participating airlines pool the money and then split it up, so it doesn’t matter which airline is actually flying the passenger. With rules against foreign ownership in place in the US, this kind of cooperation is the closest that US airlines can get to merging with a foreign airline.

In this case, we see the airlines saying that the joint venture has “increased the travel options available to clients of all three airlines, with more frequencies and more destinations, as well as better connections across all three networks.” But how much of this is achievable without a joint venture from a customer perspective?

Airlines can and do codeshare without a joint venture all the time, as you all well know. So the connectivity aspect isn’t something that requires a joint venture. Similarly, frequent flier cooperation has nothing to do with the joint venture. Some people believe that American and British Airways were not able to offer miles on each other’s Transatlantic flights because the feds wouldn’t approve the joint venture for a long time. They might have wanted you to believe that, but it’s not true. It was a business decision. So what exactly does a joint venture do?

Most importantly, it allows for schedule and fare coordination. Before, Iberia could start the flight to LAX, but it wouldn’t be able to strategize with American about which markets had the best connecting opportunities and adjust schedules accordingly. Now, since they share all information, American might find that it’s worth it to shift a flight to, say San Diego by half an hour because there are a ton of people flying that route and the airlines might be losing out to competitors with better schedules.

It has also allowed the airlines to cooperate on routes where they previously competed. Look at the New York to London market and its “shuttle” service. The two airlines have now aligned their flight times so that they complement each other instead of compete. Granted, they still operate from different terminals at JFK, so it’s not an easy shuttle service as you would hope, but it’s a step. And it’s a step that’s only really going to happen because of the joint venture.

Fares can also be discussed at will. So there can be much better route analyses in order to determine where the best place is to put that A340 Iberia is now sending to LA. Maybe Iberia with its own data would have decided that another flight to Chicago made sense. But after looking at the data, the combined information showed that everyone in the joint venture would be better off with the flight to LA. I don’t know if that’s true at all, but it shows how it could work.

So for the airlines, it’s all about the pseudo-merger over the Atlantic. They can now look at the data as one, though with some of the large cultural differences, it’s hard to get everyone on the same page when it comes to taking action. Still, the possibility is there and it can be good in terms of better schedules and more flights.

Can it be bad? Of course. Before, you still had BA, Iberia, and American competing for passengers over the water. Sure, they codeshared with each other, but the airline that flew the passenger got the money so there was incentive. Now, there are fewer competitors in the market since BA/Iberia/American act as one (as do Delta/Air France/KLM and Lufthansa/United/Air Canada.) In the end, the belief is that this will still be better for consumers, at least, that’s why the feds decided to approve it.

What do you think?

If you were flying on Alaska Airlines this weekend, you had a rough go of it. The airline’s computer systems crashed and that meant plenty of delays and cancellations. Unlike Southwest in its meltdown earlier this month, however, Alaska handled this brilliantly from a communication standpoint.

You can see more on what Southwest did wrong on BNET, where I wrote about Southwest’s Rapid Rewards transition, airport systems failures, and the meltdown that followed. (This, by the way, is my very last week writing for BNET after 3 years on the job.) Southwest said it didn’t want to proactively communicate more than it did because it didn’t want to overburden its website which was already having problems.

Alaska may not have had website problems to muddy the waters, but its decision to go forward with very proactive communication is something that I imagine would have been the case regardless. The airline was doing a backup power supply upgrade when a transformer “blew” and the systems went down. This happened about 3am on Saturday. There were significant delays for flights at that point, and cancellations soon start piling on – about 150 or so in total. At 802a, Alaska sent its first tweet on the situation.

If I have one complaint, I would have liked to have seen a tweet show up earlier. But after that first tweet, the airline’s Twitter account went into overdrive with 11 separate tweets giving status updates, links to more information, and of course apologies. (This doesn’t include tweets that were sent in response to concerns of others.) Certainly Twitter wasn’t the only place where the airline was active. There were also 7 separate Facebook page updates dealing with the problems and four press releases.

Most importantly, I think, there was a big travel advisory placed in orange at the top of the page with a link to more information about the outage. At the same time, Alaska decided to loosen its change policy so that anyone traveling Saturday through today could make a change without a change fee. It was noted that hold times were long on the phones, but customers could also make those changes on the website.

By noon, the systems were at least partially working but delays persisted, of course. By yesterday, nearly everything was back to normal. And that’s when Alaska got even better. Alaska President Brad Tilden and regional subsidiary Horizon Air President Glenn Johnson put a 2m29s video on YouTube apologizing for everything and giving detailed information on what happened along with how people could still get help. It put a very welcome human face on the problem.

As noted in the video, the airline is encouraging anyone who had problems to contact the airline’s customer care group for what I assume is further compensation. At the very least, a personal apology will be issued. This was reinforced on the Facebook page and with a tweet:

For those customers that were impacted by yesterday’s flt disruption, pls contact us so we may follow-up individually: http://bit.ly/hBbGpr

In the end, there were plenty of angry people, without question. People were delayed and canceled and there will undoubtedly be some horror stories that circulate around this, but sh*t happens. It’s all about how the airline deals with its customers when it does happen, and Alaska did a fantastic job in this case.

Fuel hedging no guarantee for airlines – CNN Out of the Office
Following up on last week, this week I wrote about fuel hedging and why airlines don’t actually have fuel prices locked in, for the most part.

How Not to Design a Website, Courtesy of a Lousy Indonesian Airline – BNET Headwinds
PT. Tri-M.G. Intra Asia Airlines out of Indonesia may be best known for its position on the EU blacklist (if it’s known at all), but really it should be known for a truly awful website.

US Airways Takes Its Frequent-Flier Program to the Next Level – BNET Headwinds
US Airways has added “special dividends” to keep people flying even after they’ve reached status. It’s a low cost way to keep people flying.

In the Trenches: The Agony of Credit Card Fees – Intuit Small Business Blog
Trying to compare credit card processors is like trying to grab a fistful of air. It’s impossible.

How Some Airlines Thrive Without Global Alliances – BNET Headwinds
Alliances may be for the cool kids, but there are plenty of airlines doing just fine without. Look at Alaska, JetBlue, and Hawaiian, for example.

Once again, Vision Airlines has extended its fare sale for its new routes from the Florida Panhandle “due to overwhelming response.” I think we all know what that means. At the same time, some routes have been cut before they even began, like Birmingham. Is there hope for this airline?