TSA and Continental Expanding Paperless Boarding Passes to Three More Airports

Continental Airlines is working with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to rollout paperless boarding passes at Washington's Reagan, Newark and Boston in the coming weeks.

The program allows passengers to receive their boarding passes electronically on their cell phones or PDAs (personal digital assistants), which will then be scanned by TSA officers at security checkpoints, without the need for a paper boarding pass. Continental is the first U.S. carrier to test the concept.

Each paperless boarding pass will display an encrypted two-dimensional bar code along with passenger and flight information that will identify the traveler and TSA travel document checkers will use hand-held scanners to validate its authenticity. Continental and TSA believe the technology heightens the ability to detect fraudulent boarding passes while improving customer service and reducing paper use.

TSA created the concept of how to scan the paperless boarding passes and Continental developed an implementation plan that involved encrypting the paperless boarding pass to ensure authenticity.

Continental and TSA say their paperless boarding pass pilot program is consistent with the International Air Transport Association's global standard for bar coding of passenger boarding passes.

The first paperless boarding pass pilot began in Houston in December of 2007, and is still ongoing.  Since the initial launch, enhancements have been made to the paperless boarding pass to improve the readability of the bar code on a wider variety of mobile devices.  04-25-2008.

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