Boarding pass may soon be not needed for air travel

You may soon be travelling by air without a boarding pass, yes you heard it right. In a new initiative by the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF), along with the Bureau of Civil Aviation Security Office (BCAS) and the Ministry of Civil Aviation, you could be doing an express check-in via biometrics. This is coming after some of the airports earlier this year had stopped the practice of tagging passengers’ hand baggage. This included four metro cities, namely, Kolkata, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Ahmedabad.
In an interview to PTI, the chief of CISF said that the agency was exploring the technology wherein boarding cards would not be used in all of the 59 airports it guards.


CISF is working on two projects currently. They are trying to see if they can introduce the security solutions at various airports by connecting the dots that already exists in airport security establishment. These include biometrics, video analytics and control system. Currently, at the Rajiv Gandhi International Airport, Hyderabad, this system already exists; therefore, domestic passengers who don’t have check-in baggage can avoid the check-in area and head straight to the security check.
The new system at the Hyderabad airport is being touted as an example of a smart security system that every stakeholder should take note of. This new hassle free step of passengers at airports is a welcoming step for free movement of passengers that can eventually do away with boarding passes as well.


At the Hyderabad airport, domestic passengers are now printing their boarding pass from a kiosk which is self-service. They then head straight to the security check area without having to be checked in. The CISF is planning to make use of Aadhar card and other such systems to use the biometric entry possible for passengers at the airport. This would eventually lead to the end of boarding passes in the possible future.

Internationally this has been a practice by airlines in airports around the world, and this includes Air New Zealand at Brisbane and British Airways at the Heathrow Terminal 5. The United States in America is in fact having immigration officers use passenger fingerprints for confirming identities. There could be the inclusion of iris scans and facial recognition as well. All of this gives a clear picture of a transformed future for the aviation industry in India.