Convention puts McCarran technology on display

By Kyle B. Hansen

Saturday, Sept. 19, 2009 | 2:05 a.m.

McCarran International Airport this week showed off some of the new technology used to make air travel easier for customers at an international convention in Las Vegas this week.

Some of the technology already is being used in Las Vegas and some of it is on the way.

Sponsored by McCarran and the International Air Transport Association, the three-day Check-In Conference at Mandalay Bay ended Friday afternoon.

Some came from other countries to attend the workshops targeted at representatives from airlines, airports and vendors, many of whom also had exhibition booths to show their newest products.

But the show wasn’t just in Las Vegas because of the city’s conference-friendly facilities, said Samuel Ingalls, McCarran’s information systems director.

“It’s held in Las Vegas for the simple reason that McCarran Airport has a worldwide reputation for deploying innovative technologies that support the passenger process,” he said. “It gives us an opportunity to showcase some of the things that we’re working on with the industry and to show how those have helped us in terms of our process here at McCarran.”

Jared Miller, Continental Airlines’ senior director of customer self-service, supported Ingalls’ claims about the airport.

“McCarran Airport is seen certainly throughout the United States, as well as throughout the world, as a leader in trialing new technologies and solutions for their customers, which are the airlines’ customers,” Miller said.

And many of the new ideas tried at McCarran move on to other airports.

Ingalls said the show was moved to Orlando, Fla., last year after being in Las Vegas, but returned to Nevada at the request of the attendees. It also will be in Las Vegas next year.

Travelers leaving McCarran already get the benefit of some of the newest technology in the industry.

With some airlines at McCarran it is possible to check in to a flight, go through security and board a plane without needing paper – no tickets and no boarding passes required.

“Mobile boarding,” which requires a Web-enabled phone or handheld device, is available for flights with Continental, American, Delta and Northwest that use the D gates, and three more airlines are set to begin using the system early next year, Ingalls said.

After checking in, the traveler’s mobile device displays a bar code, which can be scanned at the airport to check bags, go through security and board the plane.

Mobile boarding was used at other airports before coming to McCarran, but it is unique here because the same system is used with all airlines, Ingalls said.

Unlike most other U.S. airports, McCarran is a common-use airport, meaning that the airport provides the computers and infrastructure instead of the airlines providing it themselves.

And since there is not a separate terminal for each major airline, the mobile boarding system had to be compatible with all of the airlines instead of just one, Ingalls said.

Continental was the first airline in the nation to offer paperless boarding, Miller said. It now offers the service at 27 airports and almost 1 million customers have used a mobile device to board a flight with the airline, he said.

About 70 percent of Continental passengers check in before they reach the airport.

“All of the carriers, large or small, domestic or international, are moving as quickly as they can toward mobile, and one of the main reasons is because the customer demanded it,” Ingalls said.

The mobile-device bar codes also will be important in one of the new features at McCarran’s Terminal 3, which is under construction.

The terminal will be the first in the nation to include new automatic boarding gates that will scan the passenger’s boarding pass – or mobile device – to allow access to the plane.

The gates are similar to those used in most subway systems and are used in other airports around the world, but have yet to be installed in a new terminal in the United States, said Herve Muller, the general manager of IER, the company that builds the machines.

Terminal 3 gives McCarran officials a chance to start fresh and include new technology, Ingalls said, and the facility has been designed to be flexible to include new technology in the future.

“What we do today in the check-in environment is probably not going to be what we’re doing five years from now, almost certainly not what we’ll be doing in 10 years,” Ingalls said. “We’ve tried to build as much flexibility into that facility as we possibly could without being locked into a particular mode of doing business or a mode of operating.”

Ingalls said some technology adopted at McCarran has helped to develop industry-wide standards. An example is the use of RFID chips in baggage tags.

McCarran worked with industry organizations and the Transportation Security Administration to determine how the chips, which send out a radio signal to identify the bags, would be used.

The technology has been in use at McCarran since 2005, and as a result more than 99 percent of the bags have accurate readings when scanned by machines that sort them for loading and unloading planes.

“That’s far, far in excess of what the normal system would be with a bar-coded bag tag,” Ingalls said.

In the future, customers can expect to have even more control of the boarding of their flights, including tagging their own luggage and possibly even dropping it off in a common area rather than having to find a particular airline.

“The air carriers and others in the industry kind of rolled into self-service gently and slowly, they stuck their toe in the water to see how the customers would respond, and the customer response was overwhelmingly positive,” Ingalls said.

“The customer said ‘Yes, I want to be in charge of the process, because I’m going to do it as quickly and efficiently as possible. I don’t want to be waiting on someone else to help me.’ ”