SAN JOSE — Alaska Airlines hopes the future of aviation security will allow customers to leave their boarding passes and even their driver’s licenses at home.
About 200 customers of the airline who regularly fly out of Mineta San Jose International Airport are in a pilot program that allows a machine to scan their eyeballs or examine their fingerprints when checking in bags, going through airport security and boarding a plane — rather than produce IDs and boarding passes.
“I really love it. You walk in and just go straight up” to a kiosk, said Sharon Farrens, a Boise, Idaho, resident who works in San Jose and was the first person to join the program. “There’s no line. You don’t have to fish around in your purse for your ID and boarding pass. You just put your fingerprints on the screen — and you are done.”
It’s the first such program in the country, and airline officials hope it will eventually become the way almost all travelers get on planes.
Alaska Airlines quietly launched the pilot program in April through a partnership with the New York-based airport security firm CLEAR, which charges members $179 a year to get through security quickly, and operates out of 12 domestic airports. In exchange for agreeing to additional screening in advance, travelers can bypass security lines.
The technology is called biometrics — an authentication technique that uses individuals’ physical characteristics to confirm their identities.
Until recently, CLEAR members showed membership cards as identification when going through security at San Jose International. Now, subscribers scan their fingers or irises rather than produce credentials. They’re still required to show boarding passes, but people in the pilot program don’t need them. And when program participants board an Alaska Airlines plane out of San Jose, they swipe their fingers on a tablet rather than show boarding passes.
San Jose International isn’t the nation’s busiest airport by any means. But its Silicon Valley location made it an attractive place to launch the pilot.
“We thought it would be a great market sector, and we were also looking for an airport with CLEAR,” said Sandy Stelling, Alaska Airlines’ managing director of customer research and development.
The airline is no stranger to the technology. Last year, it installed fingerprint scanners that grant flyers access to its club lounges in Seattle, Anchorage, Portland and Los Angeles.
Farrens, like many other program participants, was approached by an Alaska employee at San Jose airport and asked to join. Frequent Alaska Airlines flyers in the San Jose area were also invited via email. Enrollment in the program takes 20 minutes.
Since the program is in its infancy, it hasn’t been free of hiccups.
“If customers go through this process and don’t have a boarding pass, once they have gone through the plane door they may not have anything that reminds them where their seat is,” Stelling said.
Farrens, 56, keeps her boarding pass on her phone as a backup because the Alaska Airlines tablet to scan her fingerprints sometimes is not ready for her at the gate.
Paul Pindell, another participant, said his only complaint is that it takes longer to scan his fingerprints at the gate than a boarding pass.
“Instead of taking half a second it took 2.5 seconds, but if you multiplied that by 150 people on a plane that could slow things down,” said Pindell, 48, a Eugene, Oregon, resident who frequently flies into San Jose.
And CLEAR’s fingerprint scanners can be balky. At San Jose airport this week, one woman had to scan her fingerprints over a dozen times before CLEAR officials guided her to the metal detector.
Experts on biometrics are divided about how secure the technology is.
Stephen Flynn, co-director of the George J. Kostas Research Institute for Homeland Security at Northeastern University, said that collecting biometric information will eventually allow airports to identify threats more easily, since it adds an extra level of screening.
“We have a reasonably high level of confidence that the people who use those programs pose no risk,” Flynn said.
John Huggins, executive director of UC Berkeley’s Sensor and Actuator Center, which develops micro- and nanotechnology, is critical of traditional fingerprint scanners, particularly in high-security environments.
People can fool the scanners by superimposing a copy of another person’s fingerprint onto their finger, he said. And, he added, greasy or wet fingers can also impair the image.
In the laboratory, Huggins said, he developed ultrasound fingerprint technology that “penetrates the skin and can see pores and blood vessels to see if someone is trying to spoof the fingerprint detector.”
This innovation, he said, would make the technology safer if it were used in airports.
There are also accessibility concerns.
Shoshana Magnet, associate professor of criminology at the University of Ottawa, said people who do manual labor have fingerprints that are difficult to read.
“With iris scanners, for people who are wheelchair users often times the scanners are too tall and people who have any kind of visual impairment can’t use them,” said Magnet, who wrote a book titled “When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race, and the Technology of Identity.”
But CLEAR is confident in the technology. The company has encountered problems with recording fingerprints and iris scans less than 1 percent of the time, said Caryn Seidman Becker, CEO of CLEAR. And the firm hopes to bring the technology to other markets.
“We have no specific timeline, but we look forward to working with Alaska Airlines to expand our relationship to other cities in their network,” said Ken Cornick, CLEAR’S president and CFO. “Having direct access to a boarding pass and not needing to print it or download it onto their phone is both a significant customer advantage and security advantage.”
Contact Sophie Mattson at 408-920-5764. Follow her at Twitter.com/mattsonsophie.
