Airline Passenger in Australia Said to Have Used Passbook on iOS to Board

[Maura]

AppleInsider reports today that a Virgin Australia passenger has been spotted using the new Passbook app on an iPhone running an iOS 6 beta to board a plane. The news comes from Australian Business Traveller, which says that the passenger was able to check themselves onto a flight via Virgin Australia’s mobile website on his iPhone, which then recognised the digital boarding pass and asked the passenger if they wanted to add the digital pass to Passbook. AppleInsider says that this would seem to indicate that Virgin Australia’s mobile website is using Apple’s new “.pkpass” mime type, which officially only United Airlines is supporting so far. As AppleInsider also notes, clearly other airlines and businesses will soon come on board (pardon the pun!) once iOS 6 is released, and it looks like Virgin Australia is already there. There was no word whether or not the passenger was actually able to get onto their flight using Passbook; possibly not, as the system is not yet officially released so this could be considered a security problem.

Source: Evidence of airline support for Apple's Passbook surfaces ahead of iPhone debut

 

[cursor system]

The system is still under testing.

 

[Gregoris]

even under testing it has proven to work and its so close to actual release its good that people have confidence in the app and actually using it