my iPhone as an airline boarding pass

by Justin Horn on Jan 22nd, 2009 @ 11:28 am

My Boarding Pass

The last couple times I’ve traveled there was a third option for online check in on American Airlines that was always grayed out. I could either print my boarding pass or email a link to print later, but the option to get the boarding pass directly on my iPhone was just not available for the airports I was traveling to/from. Well this all changed this week when checking in online for my flight leaving Chicago O’Hare International Airport…to my surprise this option was no longer gray and being the nerd I am I couldn’t resist!

The third option presented me with an input box for me to enter an email where I wanted the boarding pass sent.  I then went to the mail app on my iPhone and the email was already waiting for me in my inbox. The email contains a link to a special page on the aa.com website with the electronic boarding pass.

I could have used this page for the pass, but there was an option to save the pass so I decided to see what that was about. The “save” feature was basically just a link to a page with the boarding pass as a single image. I also assume aa.com detected I was on an iPhone because before clicking the save button there was instructions to tap and hold the image on the following page to save it to my phone. I did this, but the image was extremely blurry. Writing this post now I realize why it’s so blurry, it was 34 x 120 pixels…ooops American Airlines? [UPDATE seems this was an official bug in 2.2 firmware which was fixed in 2.2.1] So that was not going to work, but I could just bring up the pass in the main link from the email so I wasn’t too worried.

On the way to the airport I started thinking about what a pain it would be if for some reason the page wouldn’t load when I needed it most, so I came up with a backup plan! I decided to take a screen shot using the home / lock button trick and this image looked good as expected.

Now onto the good stuff…security and boarding. I was worried that they might not really know why I was showing them my phone, but I was wrong. I showed the first security check my iPhone with the main safari page from the email link up and my ID, they scanned it without issues and I moved into the xray / metal detector line. This was the only part that was a bit tricky because they were checking boarding passes again after walking through the metal detector, but you can’t walk through that with a phone. I asked one of the TSA agents what to do and was just told to walk through and show the agent on the other side the boarding pass, then walk back through and toss my phone in one of the little bins to run it through xray, and finally walk back through the detector again without my phone. Not really a big deal, but was funny that after I walked through again the agent was about to ask for my pass, before realizing she had just looked at it 30 seconds earlier…guess when you keep doing the same thing over and over it came natural

Made it to the gate and began my 45 or so min wait to start boarding because I got through security a lot faster than I thought. I played a little rolando and then decided to check the boarding pass again to make sure it was ready for when boarding started…it wasn’t!

Good thing I had that screen shot!

Not sure if this was just some random error that was “just my luck” or if you are expected to save the image becuase as it gets close to boarding the pass stops showing up online. I would assume it was just bad luck becuase doens’t make sense to lock you out of getting your pass right before you need it to board. Luckily for me I had put into place my awesome backup plan! I went into my camera roll, located the image, and gave the boarding agent my iPhone. It didn’t scan at first and I zoomed it in a bit more for the agent and she gave it another try and this time it worked! So for the first time I boarded a plane without using anything but my iPhone and my ID. I was now on my way back to warm and toasty Miami…wait a low temps in the upper 30s? Oh well, at least I got to try out my “iPass”.

Follow me on Twitter @justin_horn

View 2 Comments
Apples & Oranges, Featured post, iPhone

1.
1. Brett

   July 15th, 2009 4:09 pm

   

   Tried to use this option at DTW a year or so ago. I wasn’t so lucky. The security people didn’t have a clue and I had to go back to find a place to print a boarding pass… Haven’t tried it since.

2.
2. Brad

   April 1st, 2010 8:33 pm

   

   I saw the iPhone checkin at DIA this week. Anybody know when United will provide it?

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