BEUMER Receives Final Design Acceptance From TSA for Handling System at SFO
SOMERSET, N.J. (December 19, 2017) –The U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has accepted BEUMER Corporation's final design of a CrisBag tote-based baggage handling system to be installed as part of the Terminal 1 Project at San Francisco International Airport (SFO). A leading global supplier of automated baggage handling systems, BEUMER systems are used in airports in Canada, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. The SFO Terminal 1 project will be the first tote-based baggage handling system to go into operation at a U.S. airport.
“The TSA has stringent design and delivery specifications for airport baggage handling systems, and our team worked diligently to meet the planning guidelines and design standards,” said BEUMER Senior Project Manager David Delaney. “The TSA is extremely supportive of deployment of the ICS (Individual Carrier System) and RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technologies of the CrisBag system. The SFO design was accepted and allows our team to begin, which is a major accomplishment.”
In March of this year, BEUMER became the first vendor to be certified as meeting TSA requirements for in-tote screening of baggage. When used with the Smiths Detection’s CTX 9800 DSi explosives detection system, CrisBag meets the detection and false alarm rates for explosives specified by the TSA. The TSA certification applies to U.S. airports and U.S. pre-border clearance, making migration to a common-use model utilizing RFID-enabled, tote-based baggage handling system solutions more attractive. RFID tags in each CrisBag tote provides virtually 100-percent positive tracking and allows airports to know the location of every bag on the system at any time. Should a bag need to be pulled from a flight, airport personnel can quickly determine the location of that bag.
The TSA tested the effectiveness of the CrisBag system across a range of real-life conditions and situations at its full-scale Transportation Systems Integration Facility near Washington, D.C. Elements assessed included tracking, throughput, imaging, sorting and the detection of missing, unknown and oversized bags. The in-depth evaluation also recorded how rapidly the CrisBag system associated specific bags with the individual totes.
Presently, Terminal 1 at SFO has multiple baggage handling systems, each independently operated by separate carriers, which represents the legacy model of airlines owning, maintaining and operating their own baggage systems. Many airports around the world are moving to a common-use model that allows airlines to share the cost of using a single system that provides a more efficient operation for the airport, greater flexibility for the airlines and a consolidated security checkpoint for compliance with TSA regulations.
