Japan Airlines and DoCoMo plot to abolish the plane ticket

by Gareth Edwards, posted Aug 9th 2004 at 8:20AM

JAL IC-card tickets Among the uses touted for Japan cellphone colossus NTT DoCoMo's FeliCa smartcard phones is ticketless check-in and boarding at airports. It seems that Japan Airlines has gotten giddy at the possibilities this offers and has decided to scrap tickets altogether; not only will you shortly be able to swipe 'n' bleep your way through the entire process for domestic flights with a FeliCa cellphone, if you're in JAL's mileage scheme you can get a new card with an IC tag embedded, so either way the days of the paper ticket are numbered…though not quite. They'll still be handing out boarding cards at the check-in counter "to prevent trouble on board", by which we assume they mean fights over who gets the seats near the exit with the extra legroom.