ABC News

Check-in Made Easy

December 5, 2003
By Clarissa Douglas

Fingerprint Check-in

Tired of airport lines? A new Florida company aims to make checking in as easy as swiping your finger. Kinetics, Incorporated has developed a self-service airline check-in counter that doesn't need a credit or airline card. Kinetics developed the so-called K-Pass for two airlines interested in the system, but it still needs approval from the Federal Aviation Administration.

"All I need to do is walk up to the self-service unit, put my finger on the device and it will recognize me," explains company founder David Melnick. "What I don't have to do is get anything out of my wallet."

Interest in biometric technology has been growing since Sept. 11, 2001, after the terrorist attacks on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Industry revenues in biometric technologies are expected to grow from $600 million last year to more than $4 billion by 2007, according to estimates by the International Biometric Group, a New York-based consulting firm.

Melnick says, besides security, fingerprint check-in is simply giving consumers what they want — time.

"People want control of their time," he says. "They want to decide when and where their time is spent and as they get a taste of that, they want more of it."

Biometric identification could be a boon to airport security, but has caused a heated debate in regard to privacy.

Fingerprinting could allow the federal government to analyze each person who buys a ticket. They could monitor when and where a person travels, do background checks and check property and criminal records. The company argues this potentially could weed out the bad guys, and help the good guys get through security faster.