Identifications
The term license plate is the official term used by the IATA, the airlines, and the airports for the 10-digit numeric code on a bag tag issued by a carrier or handling agent at check-in. The license plate is printed on the carrier tag in bar code form and in human-readable form, as defined in Resolution 740 in the IATA Passenger Services Conference Resolutions Manual (published annually by IATA). Each digit in a license plate has a specific meaning. Contrary to popular belief, the flight number is not encoded in the license plate on the carrier tag. The license plate is an index number linking a bag to a Baggage Source Message (BSM) sent by a carrier's departure control system to an airport's baggage handling system. It is the message that contains the flight details and passenger information, thus enabling an automated baggage handling system to sort a bag automatically once it has scanned the bar code on the carrier tag. Thus these two things are essential for automated sorting of baggage. Note that the human-readable license plate may contain a 2-character IATA carrier code instead of an IATA 3-digit carrier code. For example, BA728359 instead of 0125728359, but the bar code will always be the full 10 digits (0125728359 in the example - 125 and BA being, respectively, the IATA 3-digit code and IATA 2-character code for British Airways). The first digit of a 10-digit license plate is not part of the carrier code. It can be in the range 0 to 9: 0 for interline or online tags, 1 for fallback tags (pre-printed or demand-printed tags only for use by the local baggage handling system if it cannot receive BSMs from a carrier's departure control system due to a fault in the latter or in communication between it and the baggage handling system, as defined in IATA Recommended Practice 1740b) and 2 for Rush tags. The purpose of numbers in the range 3 to 9 as the first digit of the 10-digit license plate is undefined by IATA but can be used by each carrier for its specific needs (commonly used as a million indicator for the normal 6-digit tag number).
Besides the license plate number, the tag also has:
- Name of airport of arrival
- Departure time
- IATA airport code of airport of arrival
- Airline code and flight number
- Name of passenger identified with the baggage (last name, first name)
Read more about this topic: Bag Tag