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Fig.11.
Artist’s impression of loading a multi modal passenger
container directly on a future BWB aircraft
One proposed to keep the passenger with his
or her luggage. The idea is that passengers
would take their own luggage on-board.
Luggage could be stored in separate racks
in the cabin or stored in the passenger seat.
These seats could be used in a multi-modal
way and transferred to other transport modes.
If a number of seats are combined, passengers
could travel in multi-modal pods or containers
that can be loaded onto aircraft, cars and
trains. This would provide connections
between air transport and the multi-modal
surface transport chains that many feel are
needed. Having these pods or seats, the
need to transfer individual passengers and
their luggage could be reduced to the bare
minimum.
Additionally multi-modality could be reached if
the container is compatible with other ground
and water based means of transport. Multimodal
transport, that is using two or more
transport modes for a trip between which
a transfer is necessary, seems an interesting
approach to solving today’s transportation
problems with respect to the deteriorating
accessibility of city centres, recurrent
congestion, and environmental impact.
The opposite concept is to separate the
passenger from his or her luggage completely.
Already in some cities like Vienna the
passenger can check in for his/her flight
down-town and check in the luggage as well.
Check-in is possible well before the flights will
take off. The luggage is then transported to
the airport separately from the passenger and
the passenger will only receive the luggage at
the destination airport.
The Luggage Express set out to provide a
low hassle flight experience for passengers
combined with efficient movement of their
luggage. The principle established is to
allow passengers to check in their luggage
at a large number of convenient centres,
in city areas, at large hotels, rail and bus
stations, even in local stations out of town.
The luggage could be checked in across a
wide time band from very early – perhaps
2 days before flight up until close to flight
departure. The passenger would need to
accept that very late booked in luggage
might suffer a delay compared to earlier
bookings. However, the general experience
would be that luggage would be delivered to
a destination centre. This would depend upon
the nature of the destination. In large city
areas luggage could be delivered to hotels,
bus and train termini, conference centres etc.
In smaller destinations the luggage might
be delivered to a central collecting point in
nearby towns.
The luggage operation would be operated
managerially separately from any passenger
ticket system – although the passenger ticket
might often have valid luggage attachments.