Flying domestic? Soon you will need only Aadhaar number to board flights
Similar to marquee airports such as Schiphol (Amsterdam), Brisbane and Hamad (Doha), travellers could soon enter Indian airports without flashing their identity cards and clear the check-in process through fingerprints and iris scan. The civil aviation ministry has begun the process of linking the databases of airlines and airports with passenger IDs such as Aadhaar and passport numbers for this. In the coming months, a mobile phone is all that will be required to board domestic flights in India. Passengers will be able to use biometrics to prove identity before entering terminals and will not have to show ID cards. A flight ticket or eticket will not be needed either as the airline database will show the details of the flight they are booked on, R N Choubey, Aviation secretary told Times of India.
In a small way, the process has already been tried — at a few gates of the GMR-owned Hyderabad airport. The Bengaluru airport, which is owned by the Fairfax and GVK group, is also using biometric information-enabled checking points for swift check-ins.