Biometric Baggage Check-in

Biometric scanners have been in use at several international airports for some time now. Prepare for the next wave of high-tech travel as two more biometric applications that will impact international travel are being developed by Precise Biometrics, a Swedish company with subsidiaries in the U.S. & U.K.

Part of the Homeland Security Departments strategy for improving airport security is to require airlines to guarantee that passengers who check luggage for a particular flight actually board that flight. This makes perfect sense as someone who checked a bag full of explosives is not likely to want to be on board the plane when it explodes. The first new system will help airlines meet this requirement set forth by the American Civil Aviation Administration.

The system works by requiring passengers to leave their fingerprints on a fingerprint scanner when they check their luggage. Then, of course, their fingerprints will be scanned as passengers board the plane. This technology makes it very simple to determine whether or not everyone who checked baggage boarded the plane.

Here is a more detailed explanation. At baggage check-in, the scanned fingerprints are temporarily stored. When the passenger reaches the boarding ramp, his or her fingerprints are scanned a second time. The new fingerprint is matched to the previously stored fingerprint stored at baggage check-in. After verifying a fingerprint match, both sets of fingerprints are deleted because now it has been confirmed that the passenger who checked baggage has now boarded the plane.

The second application, Match-on-Card TM, will be encoded on passports. During the testing phase the application will employ fingerprint-reading technology in passports for a European country - probably either Sweden or Greece. Licensing of the technology has already begun but it's actual implementation to newly issued passports isn't expected to commence until later this year and continue through 2012.

With these new technologies in place, terrorists and spies alive will be in search of new methods for creating passports with fake identities and it won't be easy. Perhaps they could file away their fingerprints and implant new ones with micro-thin skin like material impossible for the human eye to detect. The rest of us will just have to play by the new rules and be certain or fingerprints don't change between the time we check our baggage and the time we board our flight.