Toulouse Airport – phone only

France’s Toulouse-Blagnac Airport has become the world’s first airport to trial a system called Near Field Communication (NFC) to allow passengers to pass through the airport’s checks, controls and gates using only their mobile phones.  The airport will select 50 passengers to test this new SIM-based service on BlackBerry smartphones over the summer.  The trial is a joint effort between SITA, Toulouse-Blagnac Airport, Orange and BlackBerry.
 
The phone will effectively become the passengers’ pass allowing them access to car parking, the boarding area via a premium access zone and to a premium passenger lounge.  At the same time, passengers will receive up to the minute information such as changes to their flight times, departure hall or boarding gate.
 
Renaud Irminger, Director of SITA Lab, said: “Using the GSMA SIM-based NFC technology during the passenger journey provides many benefits over current technology: it is extremely secure; will work when the device is powered off; does not require the passenger to launch an app or retrieve an SMS or an email; and is not affected by reading problems caused by dirty screens.  Overall, a passenger using an NFC-enabled device can be processed faster than any of the boarding processes available today”. www.sita.aero www.toulouse.aeroport.fr/en

Index/Home page
 

OUR READERS' FINEST WORDS (All times and dates are GMT)

All comments are filtered to exclude any excesses but the Editor does not have to agree with what is being said. 100 words maximum