Fly the Friendly Skies with Bitcoin

G-BTCN

The British Airways booking system just went down globally, disrupting tens of thousands of passengers, causing the airline to pay fines and compensate passengers. They had to revert to hand written manual check in to keep everything moving…

A handwritten boarding pass issued to passengers on a Switzerland to London BA flight. Note the rubber stamp with a signature over it. Incredible!

How can British Airways fix their booking system, so that it never goes down, handles ticket payments, handles traveller identity, physical ticketing and everything else that they need to run their service smoothly? Bitcoin.

If British Airways used Bitcoin for payments and booking, they get a global, irreversible, infallible, flexible database system to manage everything at once, and they don't have to manage anything other than client software that checks travelers against The Bitcoin Network’s public record.

Here is how British Airways could do it.

You want to fly from Berlin to Piza on British Airways. Tickets are paid for with Bitcoin, from the British Airways ticketing app “BA-TAP”. The app shows you flight schedules and availability, special offers and all the other things British Airways already does to keep their seats full. Air miles are distributed in Bitcoin, obviously.

The BA-TAP is a Bitcoin wallet forked from an existing wallet. You sign into it with your details. When you buy a ticket, the following happens:

1/ The BA-TAP app pays for the flight with Bitcoin

2/ The BA-TAP creates a signed message in a QR code that is your ticket, containing all your details and proof that you paid, that is infallible and easily verifiable on any Bitcoin Network Explorer.

What just happened and what do we now know?

British Airways has issued a verifiably paid for ticket, and all the information they need to verify the passenger when they arrive at the gate.

Because the Private Key used to sign the ticket data is the same as the Private Key used to make the payment, we know that this is the paying passenger simply by checking the signature on the ticket.

We know that the details cannot be forged or tampered with. It is trivial to have a digitally signed image of the passport or its data that was signed with the same key that made the payment, as an extension of the fool proof ISLAND system.

British Airways did not have to do any record keeping of the payment or passenger details, because those are pushed on to the Bitcoin Network and the passenger’s BA-TAP device respectively.

For those who do not have mobile phones, this process works on paper also**.** The QR code that is the ticket containing all the information is printable, and travel agents can receive money to make the Bitcoin payment to BA for the ticket. When you buy a ticket from a travel agent, it is no different to how it used to work; you get a printed ticket in a neat folder after having paid in person.

Both mobile devices and paper tickets are scanned at the check in and gate; the scanner does not care if it is scanning a code on a phone or a piece of paper; device-less passengers are catered for equally.

By removing the need to operate their own databases and private network, BA-TAP immediately gets the benefit of absolute reliability, infallible payments for tickets and passenger information management in one fell swoop. The savings and increases in efficiency to British Airways (and all other airlines by extension) will be very significant.

None of this works on exotic software or new methods that are untested; it all works on principles and tools that are old, well understood and completely reliable. All tickets and passenger identification are infallibly verifiable, and BA has no exposure to credit card theft, charge back risk or stolen credit cards.

In this very brief sketch, you should be able to see how The Bitcoin Network could completely transform airline ticketing, and forever exclude the possibility of disastrous network outages of the type that we’ve just seen British Airways experience.

Filet De Boeuf En Croute, with all the trappings ↴