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Airlines prepare to allow cellphones as boarding passes?

Financiers think the world's airports are about to legitimise the mobile phone as a secure boarding pass; a private equity firm has poured capital into a Scottish startup, The Amor Group - which today announced a product called First Pass.

Several airlines worldwide have been testing the idea of a 2D barcode on a phone screen, instead of a piece of paper. In America, Continental airlines revealed that it was trialling a working system back in March, when Susan Stellin broke the news that the Transportation Security Administration was expected to gives its approval, reporting: 

The agency has been working with Continental since December to test electronic boarding passes, which for now can be used only for nonstop domestic flights out of the Houston hub of Continental.

Stellin quoted Andrea McCauley, a TSA executive: “We definitely see this as the wave of the future. It’s something we are very enthusiastic about pursuing.”

In Europe, BMI has revealed that it is testing the First Pass software, which was developed by Sword Group - a French software producer. Lufthansa has also trialled this software, according to Martin Arnold.  Arnold quoted FT sources for the size of the deal: £27.8m ($42m) - which he described as "the biggest private equity buy-out in Scotland this year "with the finance provided by Close Growth Capital for a management buyout.

What this investment means, simply, is that Close Growth is pretty confident that the trials are a success.

It means the startup is convinced that TSA will approve the technology in principle, and that if it wants to expand from Lufthansa and BMI into world markets, it needs to be established as a legitimate source for First Pass.

As to when ordinary coach passengers will be able to download boarding passes, well, that's anybody's guess. Right now, the airlines and airport security people see this as a "premium" service. Launch will have to wait for official confirmation, and then several other airlines will have to confirm that they can actually read phone barcodes with their check-in desk scanners, and do it reliably.

So it is probably sensible to suspect that we'll still be printing out paper boarding passes beyond the end of 2009.