SPECIAL REPORT: IT Getting personal
Ian Tunnacliffe looks into his crystal ball to predict that IT advancements will allow airports to offer a much more personalised service to passengers in 2030.
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f the airports we use in 2030 are to be radically different, then the basic technology to make it happen needs to exist now. The interesting thing is that it does. Twenty years ago airport processes were more or less as they
are today, because the technology needed to accept passengers, tag bags and control access to each stage of the process needed to be in a fixed position. It’s true that we still used paper tickets and self-service kiosks had not
yet arrived, but there is no doubt that a time traveller from 1990 would be able to get through a 2010 airport with no great difficulty. In 2030 things are going to be different. Not everywhere, of course, as
there will always be early adopters and laggards. But at the leading edge the airport will be a much easier place to deal with. The key technology that will make it so is the personal electronic device.
Today these devices take the form of iPhones, tablets and iPods, BlackBerries and Androids. In the near future we will see other form factors including devices built into eye glasses and clothing. Experience tells us that the
development and progress of these consumer technologies will be extremely rapid. However, simply having the
devices will not be enough. The real breakthrough will depend on large industrial-scale systems such as check-in, FIDS, baggage management and immigration controls being able to use personal devices as their user interface. It depends on standards going beyond those being developed now
by the Open Travel Alliance (OTA) – a standards group set up by travel companies and IT suppliers– and Open Axis, a much newer group specifically aimed at airlines and concentrating primarily on the standards needed for direct connect solutions. Real standard interfaces will allow the tyranny of fixed locations to be lifted and the structure of the airport can change. To see what this might look like, let’s follow a smart traveller in the
year 2030. Let’s call him Max and say that he lives in St Louis, Missouri, in the United States. Max has booked a trip to London from his home in St Louis. His
mum’s birthday is coming up and he has burned a big pile of frequent flyer miles to be sure he gets to see her. All the information about his flights is held in his MiCom™ personal
device. Max is quite a traditionalist and his MiCom is slim and rectangular with a screen. Some of his friends have devices whose processor is built into a piece of jewellery with stereoscopic screens contained in a pair of designer glasses. He thinks that these are fine, but is a bit dubious about proposals to
surgically implant devices and connect them directly into the optic nerve. It is all a bit too sci-fi for Max, but perfectly do-able from a pure technology viewpoint. In the automated cab to the airport, Max enters a code to his MiCom that
sends a message to all interested parties that he is committed to the journey. Arriving at the street door of Starbucks, his MiCom vibrates to
acknowledge that it has been detected by the airport network. Over a caramel macchiato (Max always had a sweet tooth) he takes out the device and checks that he has been assigned his preferred seats for the flight to New York and then on to London.
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AIRPORT WORLD/OCTOBER-NOVEMBER 2010
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