Back to Air Transport IT Review - Issue 1, April 2009

Changing the face of air travel

Based on SITA's New Frontiers Paper 'Ten technology advances that will change air travel'

In the second of our series highlighting technologies that will change the business of air travel, we look at biometrics and Collaborative Decision Making.

Biometrics

Growth in demand for air travel increases the complexity of moving large passenger volumes through airport terminals rapidly, without compromising security. Current processes involve large scale human intervention, but this can be subject to significant error rates.

In the future we can expect automated systems to verify passenger identification, using biometric recognition technology. This includes methods for recognizing individuals based on intrinsic physical or behavioural traits.

Hours cut to seconds

At present, the use of biometrics is the exception rather than the rule. Figures published in the Airport IT Trends Survey 2008 indicate that 18 percent of airports worldwide use biometric technology for some part of the passenger journey through the airport. For example, 15 percent of passengers passing through Israel's Ben Gurion International Airport are processed using a biometric system.

This has reduced waiting times at security checkpoints from hours to seconds. Bahrain International Airport is also equipped with electronic immigration gates, which allows its citizens to enter and leave the country using automated, biometric immigration procedures.

Legislation will be a major driver of biometric adoption for air travel. The US is taking the lead with a programme that requires non-US citizens to provide a biometric identifier in the form of a digital fingerprint when departing the country. The same group of passengers are already required to submit digital fingerprints and a digital photograph for admission into the country.

Extending to check-in and boarding

Biometric identification will not be limited to border management - it is also being extended to the check-in and boarding process. Currently only around two percent of airports use it for this purpose, but within five years this will have increased to over a third of airports.

SITA has participated in a biometric pilot programme at London's Heathrow Airport, which used biometrics to identify passengers, in place of paper boarding passes. Operator BAA also uses biometrics for passenger access to London Heathrow's Terminal 1 international lounge.

Biometric technologies can offer faster processing at many stages of the journey for passengers willing to sacrifice a degree of privacy. That translates into a lot less queuing and a lot more doing.

Collaborative Decision Making

The migration of the air transport industry to digital technologies is creating an explosion in the amount of data generated. The challenge is to process and share information in a way that leads to better resource allocation, improved productivity, reduced operating costs and increased punctuality. One promising approach is Collaborative Decision Making (CDM).

CDM helps provide timely and precise information to a mix of stakeholders, including airlines, air traffic control, airports and ground-handling organizations. For example, accurate estimates of arrival and departure times can improve aircraft handling, apron services, gate management, ATC and air traffic flow management.

Cutting buffers

CDM also increases the predictability of unforeseen events or disruption. Airlines include expensive buffers in their schedules to take account of potential disruption. This could be reduced, given greater predictability of events. Cutting five minutes from one half of European schedules could be worth €1 billion a year in better use of resources, according to Eurocontrol.

Europe has been a major driving force behind the use of CDM tools. Under the project name SESAR (Single European Sky ATM Research), Eurocontrol is working with airports, airlines, flight crews and air navigation service providers to improve air traffic management and airport operating efficiencies. The new system has the potential to increase traffic capacity by a factor of three.

Cutting delays

CDM is also a key plank of the US Next Generation ATS (Air Transport System) programme. The Federal Aviation Administration says that a new CDM software tool launched in March 2007 - which automatically identifies and then fills unused arrival slots - saved an estimated US$ 27 million for the airlines and 1.1 million delay minutes for air passengers in the first year of its operation.

The challenge is to drive increased integration of computer systems across multiple organizations - to provide immediacy, accuracy and completeness in the distribution of information.