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Paperless boarding goes to Jersey
Continental Airlines has expanded its paperless boarding service to Newark Liberty International. A pilot
program conducted with the Transportation Security Administration, it lets fliers use electronic boarding
passes that are sent via e-mail to their cellphones or other handheld devices such as BlackBerrys.
An encrypted bar code in the message containing passenger and travel information is scanned by TSA
screeners at security checkpoints. Travelers also must show valid identification. The program began last
year at Houston's Intercontinental and is also available at Reagan Washington National and Boston Logan.
It will run until June 30, 2009.
The end of the paper airline ticket
"If you have a paper ticket, it's time to donate it to a museum," said IATA CEO and Director General Giovanni
Bisignani prior to the opening of the association's annual meeting. As of June 1, IATA will no longer supply
paper ticket stock to 60,000 travel agencies in 125 countries around the world as it has done for decades.
Many American travelers may think that paper airline tickets are already extinct, as most U.S. airlines stopped
issuing paper tickets for domestic flights some years ago. But in other parts of the world, and particularly for
international itineraries involving multiple airlines, paper tickets are more common and it's taken 13 years from
the time the first electronic ticket was issued in 1994 to the eradication of paper ticket stock issued by IATA.
When IATA began its push for electronic ticketing in 2004 only 18% of airline tickets issued by IATA airlines
worldwide were electronic.
Free wireless Internet takes off
Mineta San Jose International launched free wireless Internet service last week. It's available in Terminals A
and C. The airport says the service will also be available in the new North Concourse and Terminal B once
they're completed later this year and in 2010, respectively. Commercial Wi-Fi service currently provided by
T-Mobile and Wayport will remain available to their subscribers at the airport.
10 airports install body scanners
BALTIMORE — Body-scanning machines that show images of people underneath
their clothing are being installed in 10 of the nation's busiest airports in one of the
biggest public uses of security devices that reveal intimate body parts.
The Transportation Security Administration recently started using body scans on
randomly chosen airline passengers in Los Angeles, Baltimore, Denver, Albuquerque
and New York's Kennedy airport. Airports in Dallas, Detroit, Las Vegas and Miami
will be added this month. Reagan National Airport near Washington starts using a
body scanner Friday. A total of 38 machines will be in use within weeks. "It's the wave
of the future," said James Schear, the TSA security director at Baltimore-Washington
International Airport, where two body scanners are in use at one checkpoint. Schear
said the scanners could eventually replace metal detectors at the nation's 2,000 airport
checkpoints and the pat-downs done on passengers who need extra screening. "We're
just scratching the surface of what we can do with whole-body imaging," Schear said.
| July, 2008 | |
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