IT To Enable Government Access To Airline Passenger Information

Aviation IT provider SITA recently announced that the firm will convert the passenger information coming from the departure control systems of 50 airlines flying into India to XML files according to the government gazette issued on January 24 2008. Currently, the passenger information related to all flights either taking off from or landing in India is transferred to the Bureau of Immigration (BoI) within a time span of 15 minutes after the aircraft arrives/ departs. SITA employs the Airline Passenger Information System (APIS) to pass on passenger data to the BoI.

For example, the passenger information of Lufthansa's Frankfurt – Delhi flight is initially captured in the computerised airline reservation system (ARS) when the passenger books the flight either through the Internet or a travel agent. The data resides on the host computers at the respective airline's ARS. From there it is moved to the departure control system (DCS) of the airline. At this juncture, the data is either in the industry standard TypeD format or any other format. SITA converts this data from the original format to XML format (as per government guidelines) and subsequently, the data is moved on to the BoI, which falls under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Home Affairs. This data is further scanned by watch list software, which uses basic biographical information to decide whether a passenger should be allowed destination access.

More from Biztech

The original data is converted into the XML format on SITA's iDetect application.

Data can be entered from any other software and converted into XML format that provides the required flexibility to exchange information following various protocols. The data coming from different airlines may not be in a universal format and thus, the XML format allows SITA to present data to the BoI in a standard format.

The data travels over the communication network (WAN) operated by SITA and used by the entire airline community. There are a lot of applications that run on this network. APIS is just one of them. "The network offers 99.99 percent availability," said Maneesh Jaikrishna, SITA director for India and South Asia.

The BoI gets the data 15 minutes after the flight departure. Jaikrishna says, "SITA is happy to provide this service with a view to a possible move to interactive APIS, which would enable the Indian government to receive this information at actual check-in rather than 15 minutes after flight departure. This would allow automatic detection of suspects before aircraft boarding by cross-matching of passenger data against watch lists."

Apart from airline passenger processing, there are advanced PNR (Passenger Name Record) capture systems operational in other countries that capture detailed information of passengers. Such comprehensive passenger information may include the medium of booking, the seat type (a window seat, high end seat etc), the medium of payment, the agent’s name, any change in itinerary and other details. In case the concerned authority suspects certain individuals in a particular flight, the information can be used to correlate with some other information to arrive at conclusions. In addition, some DCS also store the passenger’s travel history. Currently, USA is using a similar system viz Advance Quick Query (AQQ) while Australia uses an Electronic Travel authorisation system. Every country has its own set of requirements and the system is mapped accordingly.

A spokesperson of Kingfisher Airlines, which recently kicked off its international operations on September 3, said, "Kingfisher does provide passenger information to the BoI regarding all guests arriving into India via its flights from LHR (London Heathrow Airport). This is facilitated by the system provided and hosted by SITA on a shared platform."

R N Moorthy, GM – IT, Jet Airways, said, "EDIFACT (An Electronic Data Interchange standard) messages from the Departure Control System (DCS) of the respective destination, which is the last boarding point outside India are received on a predefined server of Jet Airways within half an hour of the flight departure. Each destination has a different DCS. The programme is designed to identify these and accordingly convert the file validations. Checks have also been built in to remove irrelevant information. The flat file is generated on the basis of the format given by the immigration authorities and is then transmitted to the concerned BoI location."

The ultimate aim of any kind of data conversion system is to provide the government with crucial passenger information for enhancing national and global security.