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The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a UN agency, is preparing major changes in the way travel by plane, by introducing a digital passport that would eliminate the need for check-in and boarding ticket. The measures could enter into force in the next three years, notes The Guardian.
The proposed system would allow passengers to store their passport data on your mobile phone and use a digital “travel permit”, issued at the time of reservation. The document would automatically update if flight changes occur.
Currently, passengers have to make the check-in-online or at the airport-and present the boarding book in several points, including the access gate. The new formula would eliminate these stages. The identification would be done by facial recognition, and the airlines would be notified automatically when the passenger arrives at the airport and his face is scanned.
Valérie Viale, product director at Amadeus (a global technology company specialized in computer solutions for the tourism and transport industry), said it is the biggest changes in the last five decades. “The last major modernization was the transition to electronic tickets, in the early 2000s. Now the industry considers it time to adopt modern systems, similar to those used by Amazon,” she said for The Times.
In order for these plans to be successfully implemented, modernization of airport infrastructure, including facial recognition technology and equipment capable of reading passports from mobile devices would be required.
“Many of the systems of airlines have not changed for over 50 years, because everything has to be uniform and interoperable throughout the industry,” Viale explained.
The new technology could raise question marks related to privacy, but Amadeus claims that it has developed a system in which passenger data is deleted within 15 seconds from each contact with a “control point” – such as the gates before the security filter.
The way in which the delays and the connecting flights are managed could also be changed. Within the new developing technology, passengers who lose a connection for reasons that they do not take on could automatically receive a notification with the details of the new flight. The travel permit would be updated automatically, and they could climb directly into the reprogrammed plane.
“Currently, airline systems are fragmented. The reservation system communicates with other platforms only when the check-in opens. In the future, the process will be continuous, and the travel permit-dynamic,” added VIALE.
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