Boarding Pass to Disappear

As a frequent flyer I was very interested to read this, again from the Internet, but from the Daily Telegraph.

The humble boarding pass is becoming the latest victim of the aviation industry’s drive towards a paperless future. Instead passengers will use their mobile phones to board an aircraft, with the device being read by a scanner at the departure gate.

It will mean that passengers will no longer rummage through every pocket at the departure gate only to find the pass has been used as a bookmark for a paperback bought 20 minutes earlier but now searching for their phones.

British Airways mobile phone boarding pass will make its debut on the iPhone soon Monday, when it will be available on flights on the Heathrow – Edinburgh route. Other airlines, such as Air France, have already introduced the technology, BA has gone further incorporating the pass as part of an all-singing, all-dancing application. The airline believes a mobile phone cannot only carry a boarding pass, but just about anything else a passenger might want.

Its software developers have developed an application which will not only contain the boarding pass, but also flight information, frequent flier points, check-in times and eventually boarding gates and boarding times. BA’s iPhone boarding pass is expected to be ready for all domestic destinations by the end of August and for the bulk of short haul routes within six months with most long-distance destinations are expected be incorporated by the middle of next year and the United States by the end of December 2011.

The key to the introduction of the mobile phone boarding passes is the development of a new generation of scanners which can read different airlines’ codes.

Underpinning the drive for the new technology in the aviation industry is an attempt to simplify the process of going through and airport cutting out the delays which have infuriated passengers across the world. Even saving a couple of seconds on processing an individual passenger can make a dramatic difference to the length of queues.

It is among a series of developments which airline passengers can expect over the next few years, with carriers also looking at putting radio tags on luggage to prevent bags being lost.