The Department of Home Affairs (DHA) and the aviation IT systems developer and implementer, SITA, confirmed yesterday that the Advanced Passenger Processing (APP) system will be fully completed by November this year.
The APP system implementation, says DHA chief director for communication services Siobhan McCarthy, will be completed well before the 2010 deadline, giving the department time to test the system before the rush of travellers for the Soccer World Cup next year.
The system will first be deployed at all of the country's international airports, before being expanded to all border posts.
The APP system, which is mostly software-based with some hardware components, such as scanning equipment, is part of the DHA's overall border management initiative to improve the security of the country's borders and manage “undesirable” travellers to SA.
Says McCarthy: “This technology is not just for 2010. We are putting down the technology now as a basis for the future and the larger e-border system. The 2010 Soccer World Cup simply made us change the deadline to earlier and made government more focused on the technology we need. We are planning a phased approach of technology implementations to ultimately reach a stage where we have e-passports in place.”
Khodr Akil, VP for IT aviation specialist SITA (not to be confused with SA's State IT Agency), explains that APP will allow countries to check if a passenger is an “undesirable” traveller and has the correct visa and documentation, and are not on worldwide security watch lists, before they even board the plane.
“The system will, in split-seconds, send the passenger details to the country of destination to verify if this person will be allowed into that country and will send an immediate response back. It will also process the passenger's data from various databases to establish if this person is a possible threat and should be allowed on the flight or into the country being travelled to,” he says.
According to Natasha Georgiev, head of marketing for SITA Africa, the APP system could shorten border control queues at airport arrivals and shorten immigration processing to 20 seconds per person, except if a person is flagged as a threat or “undesirable”.
Georgiev says South African airports could expect estimated timesavings of 30% and a possible 20% of floor space to dedicate to retail, as the APP system will require less border control agents.
The system will also link the various stakeholders within the government security cluster, such as the South African Police Service, the National Intelligence Agency and even the South African Revenue Service, to share individuals' information.
Neither the DHA nor SITA would to divulge the cost of the project, but said it is part and parcel of the DHA's R500 million budgeted for IT projects. Akil noted that the cost is in line with other similar implementations across the world. The Kuwait APP implementation cost was $37 million.
McCarthy says the DHA will cover the initial cost of the implementation of APP, but will resort to other financing options, such as possible increased taxes and hiked ticket prices, to cover the maintenance cost of the system.
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