Towards dissociation of passengers and baggage

Dissociation of passenger travel and baggage delivery is being considered as one of the radical innovations in future air transport. This paper elaborates on this idea to identify potential benefits as well as implementation challenges. It is argued that complete end-to-end dissociation involving also the air segment is critically dependent on dissociation provided first in the ground segment. The end-to-end dissociation is likely to lead to full outsourcing of baggage services outside airports to the 3rd party providers while treating baggage as cargo at airports. Even though large scale dissociation may be challenging or less beneficial, the situation appears very different at smaller scales. In order to obtain initial assessment of baggage volumes expected in the ground segment in a large metropolitan area, arrival and departure flight data from 4 major London airports were used to infer the baggage flows between these airports and the Greater London area. Our analysis estimates that the required baggage transport and processing capacity is as large as 100’s of bags per hour per a baggage distribution center in the city. This capacity can be reduced by at least 30% provided that the baggage flow variations are suppressed by exploiting temporary storage facilities.