Soon,all you’ll need to fly is your cellphone

Travellers will be required to put their cellphones in the designated kiosks and the machine will read the bar code or the PNR number from the screen of the cellphone itself. The bar-code scanner will either read the code or identify the passenger with the help of the PNR number generated in the e-ticket stored in the cellphone.

“The trial runs were conducted at the Indira Gandhi International Airport here recently. All the safety and security issues are being looked into and it will soon be given a clearance,” said a senior civil aviation security official.

“It would reduce the congestion at the airports and we will have a kind of electronic surveillance on the movement of any passenger at any given point in time. Everything will be recorded electronically. But it has its drawbacks also and we are studying the entire process to get a clearer picture,” said the official.

Currently,a passenger has to produce the printout of his e-ticket before entering the terminal building which is checked by the CISF personnel stationed there. The passenger then has to proceed to the check-in counter with the same printout where the airline official generates a boarding pass. Sometimes this process takes a while leading to long queues during peak travel hours.

Once the boarding pass has been generated the passenger has to proceed for the security check and from there on to the security hold area. At all these places,the passenger has to produce the boarding pass.

HOW IT WORKS

* Show the e-ticket on your cellphone to the CISF personnel at the gate of the terminal building for entry. The CISF personnel will hold an optical scanner to read the bar code from the screen of the cellphone.

* Proceed to the check-in counter where the scanner in the kiosk would read the bar code again and the boarding pass will be generated on the cellphone.

* The electronic boarding pass would have to be shown to the CISF personnel again before the security hold area.

* Once the security process is completed,the same electronic boarding pass will have to be shown to the CISF personnel and the airline official before boarding the aircraft.