Over 50 airlines choose SITA to meet Indian requirements on advance passenger information
By the end of the year almost all of the airlines serving some 75% of all India-bound passengers, will deliver Advance Passenger Information System (APIS) information using this system.
Aviation IT specialist SITA announced today that over 50 airlines flying into India will use its communications network to meet new Indian government requirements for the provision of advance passenger information 15 minutes after flight departure.
Following a test period, over 50 airlines are already using SITA's community Advance Passenger Information System (APIS) solution which has had to be customized to meet the new security requirements of the Indian government and particularly the special requirement for submission of APIS data in XML files rather than the standard US or UN Edifact. By the end of the year almost all of the airlines serving some 75% of all India-bound passengers, will deliver APIS information using this system.
In line with ICAO Recommended Practice, APIS collects basic biographical information from machine-readable travel documents such as passports and visas - in other words the same information that would be provided to border agents.
Speaking at India Aviation 2008, Bruno Frentzel, SITA Senior Vice President, Applications Services, said: "SITA, as a community provider of IT solutions to the air transport industry, is pleased that we have been able to adapt our APIS solution to meet both the needs of the airlines and the India government."
Together with IATA, SITA strongly supports international standards to make the automatic delivery of passenger information to governments as painless as possible. Many governments around the world have special requirements for security and facilitation. Airlines using SITA's Community Hub have the complexity of differing government requirements removed as SITA can take the appropriate data and securely deliver it to the government in the unique format requested. The SITA solution is being deployed for airlines flying into six major airports, Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Cochin, Hyderabad and Chennai as per current government requirements which may be extended to all international gateways in due course.
Maneesh Jaikrishna, SITA Director for India and South Asia, said: "SITA is happy to provide this service with a view to a possible move to interactive APIS which would enable the Indian government to receive this information at actual check-in rather than 15 minutes after flight departure. This would allow automatic detection of suspects before boarding the aircraft by cross-matching the passenger data against watch lists."
SITA is the world's leading provider of APIS services to airlines and governments. It provides such services in Australia, Bahrain, Canada, Kuwait, UK, USA, New Zealand and Spain. This year's SITA/Airline Business Airline IT Trend Survey showed that only 16% of airlines provide no passenger data and by 2009 this will drop to 3%.
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