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Aviation ground handling

BRS System

Baggage reconciliation for airport ground operations. No bag flies without its passenger on board.

Sector
Aviation ground handling
Components
Handheld application · Operations console · Reconciliation backend
Stack
React NativeExpoNext.jsMongoDBMQTTSQLiteS3-compatible storageDocker
Overview

Tracks every bag from check-in to the hold, and refuses to clear a flight until each loaded bag matches a passenger who actually boarded.

Baggage reconciliation is a security control before it is a logistics one. It means keeping three records in agreement: what the airline checked in, who boarded, and what our agents scanned into the hold.

A handheld app for ramp agents, a web console for supervisors, and a backend that owns the logic and the airline messaging. A scan on the apron updates the supervisor's screen instantly.

Components

Handheld application

Scan tags, load and unload containers, work a flight. Android-first, one-handed.

Operations console

Live flight state, itineraries, containers, positions and operational catalogues for supervisors.

Reconciliation backend

The state machine, the reconciliation decision, and both directions of airline messaging.

Technical challenges

  1. A decision with asymmetric costs

    Closing a flight yields reconciled, reconciled with exceptions, or blocked. A false block grounds a departure; a false clear is a security breach.

  2. A teletype protocol from the 1970s

    Airlines exchange IATA Type B messages: fixed-element plain text with no schema and no validation. We built our own parser, emitter and conformance tests.

  3. The network is the least reliable component

    Aprons have poor coverage or none. Scans queue locally and sync later, so the order of events decides the outcome, never their arrival time.

  4. Real time without polling

    Handhelds and browsers subscribe to a message broker. A bag scanned on the ramp appears on the supervisor's screen immediately.

  5. Container operations are atomic

    Loading or unloading a container flips dozens of bags in one transition, with capacity enforced by count and weight at scan time.

  6. You cannot test on real flights

    There is no staging airport. A scenario simulator drives synthetic flights, bags and failure cases through the system before it runs anywhere real.

Tell us where you are starting from. We take it from there.

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