By Calvin Biesecker

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and Continental Airlines [CAL] kicked off a new pilot project this week at George Bush International Airport that allows passengers to receive their boarding passes electronically on their cell phones or PDAs, eliminating the need for a paper boarding pass.

Moreover, unlike the current paper boarding passes, which don’t have any security features built in, the electronic passes are encrypted so that a TSA officer at the front of an airport security checkpoint can verify the authenticity of the passes using a handheld screening device. The officer would still check a passenger’s photo identification and match the name on that document against the information contained on the electronic pass.

A TSA spokeswoman said that the encrypted electronic passes are also more secure than current boarding passes because the paper ones can be forged.

The pilot project at the airport in Houston, Texas, will last three months. TSA will continuously evaluate the project, the agency spokeswoman said.

Electronic boarding passes are not new, at least for several foreign-based airlines such as Air Canada, which provides the service to its customers flying within Canada and abroad, except to the United States. That’s because TSA has been concerned that there isn’t a way to validate the authenticity of the electronic pass. Air Canada and other airlines such as Air Berlin and Spanair are using electronic passes based on a standard developed this year by the International Air Transport Association (IATA). However, the IATA standard, which is global, doesn’t require an encrypted security feature.

So TSA developed an encryption feature in the electronic passes being trialed by Continental. The agency plans to keep the lines of communication open with IATA as the trial continues, the TSA spokeswoman said. If the TSA pilot is successful, IATA will use the lessons learned from that to add the encryption feature to its existing standard for airlines worldwide, Steve Lott, a spokesman for IATA in the United States, told Defense Daily yesterday.

“The deployment of the paperless technology signifies the TSA’s ongoing commitment to develop and execute new technologies within aviation while enhancing security,” Mel Carraway, TSA general manager for field operations, Office of Security Operations, said in a statement yesterday.

The electronic pass is delivered in the form of a bar code to a passenger’s cell or PDA. At the checkpoint, the passenger just presents the bar code as it appears on the display screen of the electronic device for scanning. If successful, the pilot project will pave the way for an expansion of the technology to other U.S. and even international carriers.