Back to Air Transport IT Review - Issue 2, September 2009

The move towards PNR and APIS

By Tom Marten
Vice President, Government and Security Solutions, SITA

There is increasing evidence that more and more governments are opting for Passenger Name Record (PNR) data and interactive Advance Passenger Information System (APIS) in preference to the legacy systems in place around the world today.

When you look at the respective data captured by the various approaches it is easy to understand why.

APIS - no privacy concerns

APIS data is easy to get. It comes from the departure control system and generally doesn't present any privacy concerns. It's basically the data provided routinely by travellers when they cross an international border. No privacy authority anywhere has ever determined that there is sensitive personal data in an APIS data set.

This information is extremely useful for checking databases for suspects who you are aware of - these are people who have broken the law in the past; people with over-stayed visas; or anyone on a watch list that the border authorities wish to deny entry to.

Legacy APIS versus interactive APIS

The US first developed a 'legacy' APIS system in the late 1980s which involved submission of passenger manifest data by airlines after wheels up. Many governments around the world have followed the US lead but so-called "legacy" APIS systems are plagued by two issues: timing and data quality.

Passenger data is provided to governments after the aircraft is already en route, so if there is a known criminal identified on board, you have got a problem. Data quality can be a problem because passenger data is provided 'as is,' typos and all, and is often provided in a format unintelligible to governments.

Both issues were resolved with the development of interactive APIS in Australia in the late 1990s. Interactive APIS systems, such as the SITA APP system (Advance Passenger Processing), includes internal data quality controls to ensure that only validated data is transmitted to governments, in a format they can readily understand and use.

Moreover, passenger data is collected earlier in the passenger journey - literally at check-in - allowing governments to check their watch lists and make board/no board directives to airlines prior to take off. Significantly, the US Government adopted interactive APIS in 2009 and other governments are following suit to capture the security and facilitation benefits of the solution.

PNR - challenges

PNR on the other hand poses additional policy and technological challenges, but it gives much greater functionality. It does raise privacy concerns because the PNR data set comes from the airline reservation system, and includes some personal information not normally provided by travellers in order to cross an international border.

The European Union has identified specific fields of data contained in a PNR data set that it considers to be 'sensitive personal data' that should not be exported from the EU. SITA's border management solutions can work around this by excluding such information from the passenger data sent to governments.

But what is important about PNR data is that it allows border agencies to identify high risk travellers who are arriving at the border but who are not on a no-fly list. In other words, it enables border agencies to identify suspects who they are not aware of in advance, as they are not on the list of known suspects.

So while the border authority does not know who the suspects are, they are able to identify and focus their attention on them when they arrive. Conversely, they can move the vast majority of travellers, who present no risk whatsoever, through the airport and across borders more quickly and comfortably.

PNR can also be extremely useful to criminal investigations. To use one example, in the Mumbai terrorist attacks, the suspects arrived by sea on the day of the attack. But it was clear that they had flown in and out on previous occasions to train for their criminal act. PNR information would be extremely useful to the subsequent investigation to help identify who else was involved.

So PNR is not just about catching suspects at your border. It also supports forensic investigations. This is extremely useful to law enforcement officials and explains why there is an increasing focus on PNR. In time, it is likely that all governments will use PNR risk analysis as a tool to secure borders and facilitate the movements of legitimate air travellers.

PNR risk analysis, together with interactive APIS, are clearly the preferred solutions for border management globally.

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