Two observations, as I’m looking at my boarding passes for my flight to Newark, just a couple hours away.
First, the 100 millionth passenger of 2006 lands at one of the New York airports (JFK, LGA, or EWR) today. Boy, I sure hope I’m the lucky winner. Imagine the perks!
Second, and more relevant to the boarding passes: I’m flying United today, but I’m reminded of a recent US Airways flight, and how those boarding passes differed. Those were also printed at home after online check-in, but they lacked a barcode. Here’s one:
I don’t fly US Airways much, so I honestly thought there must be some kind of error, and that the TSA or the airline would give me a hard time. I even asked a US Airways employee if the boarding pass looked okay, because it seemed so… half-assed. The image quality was crap, the print was tiny, and there was no barcode. Security? Ha! Anyone could forge this thing, even without Christopher Soghoian’s fake boarding pass generator. But she said it was fine, and she gave me one of those “is this guy nuts” looks. Good enough!
I suppose US Airways prefers people-power, manually entering passenger data into the computer to check passengers in, to technology.
RSS (FeedBurner)
Read with Amazon Kindle
Subscribe by E-mail
Follow on Twitter
December 21st, 2006 at 9:56 am
[...] The winner isn’t me I was not the 100 millionth passenger to pass through a New York area airport yesterday. Shucks. The winner, a Taiwanese woman, “was lavished with flowers and gifts including airline tickets, gift certificates, a Tiffany crystal apple, passes to city museums, cookbooks, tickets to Broadway shows, hotel accommodations and tickets to a New York Mets game.” Umm, the Mets aren’t playing right now. Maybe the airline tickets she won can be used to fly back for a game. They might have also considered buying her a suitcase for the extra crap she won. And maybe they should pay her excess luggage fee, while we’re at it. [...]