Paperless . The dream of the future world has remained just that: A dream. Finally, though, the trees are a little closer to retirement, as the US takes on paperless boarding. Continental Airlines is running a pilot (ahem) project in Houston where passengers can use their cellphones as boarding passes.
The system uses 2D barcodes and the phone display is scanned by a TSA official. Apparently this will be more secure than a boarding pass you might, say, print at home, although we’ll give it around five minutes before somebody hacks together an online barcode generator.
Paperless boarding has been around for a while, but this is the first such scheme in the US. The success in other countries means that it’ll probably become the standard way to fly very soon.
Cellphone could be boarding pass, too [USA Today]