How UPS Next Day delivers (photos of UPS' gigantic Worldport air facility) | Hacker News Reader

How UPS Next Day delivers (photos of UPS' gigantic Worldport air facility)

news.cnet.com

23 pointstimr15 comments

And who doesn't love the UPS? I'll bet they're the most beloved company on earth. They're like the mail, except that instead of delivering bills and subpoenas, they deliver Christmas presents year-round.

It sure feels like I'm unwrapping a gift whenever I open a package I ordered on the internet!

There's a really excellent hour-long show on NatGeo called Ultimate Factories that did a great episode on the UPS Worldport.

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/series/ultimate-factor...

Check your local listings, it's been playing recently.

Nice description, including a video.

It would be nice to know why the conveyor belt system looks so complex. It appears that aircraft arrive at the left and right hand sides of this big building and then need to get routed to the correct slot to go onto another aircraft. Why all the complex belts? Why can't this be solved with a single large oval belt that kicks off packages at just the right spot to go on an aircraft?

There are three separate conveyor systems-- one for smalls (envelopes), one for parcels (boxes), and one for irregulars. Factor in the complexities with the physical layout (branching), any data cleaning that has to take place (mislabels, etc), the need for queuing/caching when planes are delayed, etc, differing priorities for sorting/routing, and it starts to look like a pretty complex system.

I guess your explanation is better informed than mine.

I wonder why my innocent, self-deprecating, and not-all-that-interesting comment got modded down and back up to zero so often.

There are starting to be a significant number of users with a hair trigger for downmodding comments. Dealing with this is one of my top priorities for the site at the moment.

War behind the scenes.

I was just wondering. I could have lived with a simple downmod - but this turns out to be more interesting (if annoying to you).

(I should have done those statistics (and a few more) about news.yc I was talking about some time ago.)

Perhaps it works like a switch - and one (basically) linear system like a single large oval would be overwhelmed.

http://news.cnet.com/2300-13576_3-6242193-15.html?tag=ne.gal...

This one's amazing. Hundreds (thousands) of flights above the US.

wow...

I have to say that fact that I got minus 5 from this comment is pretty indicative of the kind of community hacker news, and I mean it as a compliment. I saw the UPS thing and the first thing out of my mouth was wow, it was instinctual , as soon as I submitted it I knew some negative karma was coming my way. I forgot that I wasn't on digg.

I suggest a new tag for headlines, much like the [exe], [vid] or [pdf] how about a [spread] tag that indicates that in the end you will end up far away from hacker news (in this case around 10 back clicks)

- or perhaps I just have a case of the "mondays"

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