AIRASIA X & FLIGHT TO LONDON



AirAsia X is a low-cost long-haul airline launched in January 2007 and commenced commercial services in November 2007. Using an A340 the airline linked Kuala Lumpur with London Stansted five times a week.  With only one aircraft dedicated to the route and a flight time of between 13 and 14 hours it was not possible to operate a daily service. As a result AirAsia X operates five weekly flights with a variety of departure times to keep the aircraft in the air as much as possible. Turnaround times at London Stansted were scheduled for between 80 and 90 minutes.

Based on a simple research, AirAsia X’s fares were around 20% lower than those of Malaysian Airlines operating from London Heathrow. Onboard charges from Kuala Lumpur to Stansted were denominated in RM whilst the return were in pound sterling (or similar conversion when paid in RM).

AirAsia X's maiden flight from London arrived at the Low Cost Carrier Terminal (LCCT) on 12 March 2009 to a colourful cultural reception by Tourism Malaysia. The flight departed London's Stansted Airport at 6.00 pm (UK time) and touched down at Sepang at 3.00 pm.

AirAsia X confirmed on 12 July 2011 about its plan to relocate its UK base from Stansted to Gatwick Airport from 24 October 2011. 

On 12 January 2012, AirAsia X withdrew services to London and Paris, citing high fuel prices, UK Government’s decision to increase Air Passenger Duty (APD), from 1 April 2012, and the introduction of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), under which airlines operating in Europe are fined for exceeding strict carbon emissions limits as well as weak travel demand due to global economic uncertainty. Last flights for routes from London and Paris were 30 March and 31 March respectively.
 
As a remark, AirAsia X's processing/booking fees, on board charges and check-in luggage cost more than full-fledged carrier.

Model G : Proprietary Biometric Passport 1998 — 2010

Malaysia was the first country in the world to develop and deploy electronic passport en masse in 1998. It was launched at Iris Smart Complex, Technology Park Malaysia by the Prime Minister who also was the Home Minister, Dr Mahathir Mohamed on 23 March 1998 and made available for the public the day after at the immigration offices across Klang Valley before being expanded nationwide in stages.^[1]

The technology, including chip and mechanism, was developed by Iris Technologies (M) Sdn Bhd, pioneering into the world's first electronic passport. The chip, part of the high-security features of the passport, stores personal biometric identifiers of the holder including digitized two fingerprints images and digitized photograph. Due to the technology being developed as proprietary, the passports were only being able to be read by Malaysian immigrations or countries which have permission. Proprietary chip, only computers at Malaysian Immigration can read the chip's content.

With the new technology, it was meant to deter forgery and tampering of the document, with these ensuring the integrity, authenticity and reliability of document as well as to speed up information retrieval.

The chip in an electronic passport was the use of another composite form to store information through contactless reading/writing on the document as well as providing verification of information and with the advancement of technology, allowing verification against a centralized database. It also helps to provide a tamper-proof document, combat terrorism, forgeries and fraud as the chip provides authenticity, integrity and reliability. The chip is believed to have a lifespan of 10 years.

The major difference with the previous booklet format is the addition of security features including a chip with the holder's facial biometric, contact-less smart card technology as well as a microprocessor and antenna to power the chip and allow communication between the passport and the passport readers.

With the introduction of this new biometric passport which has a write-once only chip, the document can no longer be renewed or extended beyond its 5-year validity.

PROPRIETARY TECHNOLOGY

Malaysia's earliest generation of biometric passports was based on proprietary technology and the information on it is not universally readable by other countries. Malaysian immigration checkpoints were the only ones with the technology to read and authenticate the data from the RFID chip using a fingerprint scanner and facial recognition technology. The biometric passport was designed to be read-only if the receiving country has authorization from the Malaysian Immigration Department.

Despite the chip has a write-once design, an upgrade was made in 2003 to add a module to record the last 10 travels record. Entering and leaving Malaysia were longer needed to be endorsed by mean of rubber-stamping as the information will be automatic recorded and time stamping on the passport chip.
 
>> photo first generation chip^[2]
https://www.icao.int/Meetings/FAL12/Documents/Malaysia.pdf page 7

Passport booklets were printed by National Security Printer and passport inlay made of PVC and PET material by IRIS Corporation Bhd. The Inlay for the E-MRP is located on the cover of the last page of the EPP. Material for inlay is a combination of PET and PVC
Contactless Silicon Substrate
It uses contactless smart card technology, including a microprocessor chip (computer chip) and antenna (for both power to the chip and communication) embedded in the back cover of the passport.

Inserted between the layers of the document
RFID 8kb chip card^[3] on the last page, but non-ICAO is compliant because of proprietary technology. Proprietary tech, using Secured Access Module. The difference between ICAO compliance and Malaysia's proprietary biometrics lies in the storage of fingerprint template instead of fingerprint image in the chip, the rest of the technologies are the same.

The ePassport system comprises 2 main parts:^[4]

1. Passport Production System - It consists of the IRIS Main Capture System and IRIS Personalization System. This system incorporates the use of both software and hardware to process, compress and encode data passed from the database into the silicon substrate embedded within the passport. 
2. Data Retrieval System - It provides both software and hardware to retrieve the compressed data in a silicon substrate and decompressed it for display for authentication.

Patented - Washington DC August 29, 2000
Iris, based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, was assigned U.S. Patent No. 6,111,506 entitled “method of making an improved security identification document including contactless communication insert unit,” in August 2000 by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The patent covers a method for manufacturing a secure electronic passport, which consists of a computer chip containing biographical and biometric information of the passport holder.^[5]
Inventors Chas Hock Eng Yap, Foong Mei Chua
 

IMMIGRATION AUTOGATE

At Kuala Lumpur International Airport, Malaysian citizens present their e-passports to an Autogate and authenticate themselves via a fingerprint scanner, without any direct human contact. If the fingerprint matches the e-passport data, the gate opens and the e-passport

 iris scans and fingerprints are secondary biometrics specified in the ICAO document, and fingerprints are the primary biometric for Malaysian e-passports

ISSUES

A number of issues related to foreign immigration offices not accepting Malaysian passports because the booklet was missing exit stampings from Malaysian immigrations led to entry being denied or documents being suspected as forgeries.^[6]

FEES STRUCTURE

Passport Application Form IM.42 was available for a fee of RM1 before later given for free around 2007 (tbc).


 
Since being increased in 1997, the fees remain the same throughout this model's lifetime.

These new issues are no longer permitted for renewal and only made valid for five years. However, in 2009, the government introduced passports with 2-year validity and cost only RM100.

Malaysian Passport for Children and Students 
For children and students who intend to study overseas will have the privilege of paying the passport half of the normal price with conditions:-
For children, must be below 12 years old on the date of submission.
For students below 21 years old on the date of submission with the offer letter from the overseas institution or letter from the respective sponsor.

Passport issuance normally takes around 3 days but in July 2006, it was announced that Malaysians will receive their passports within two hours upon payment being made^[7] and later upgraded to be hand over within one hour.

PHYSICAL STRUCTURES


   
The cover was printed using the gold foil debossing technique where the print is pressed into the material to leave a permanent cavity.

The adjectival form used on page 1 is somehow vague as the country adjective for Malaysia is Malaysian, therefore in English, it should have been written as MALAYSIAN PASSPORT.

Document's number which was repeated as either using laser perforation or printed as a barcode is of eight digits without the prefix of holder's residency status alphabet within the Federation of Malaysia. A is for the resident of the peninsular (known as Malaya or the Malay States), K is for Sarawak and H is for Sabah.



Upon renewal, additional observations regarding previous passport information will be printed on page 31.

VARIETIES

Three different versions are observed for this model.
 
Version I : Proprietary Biometric Passport, Generation 1 (1998 - 2002)

The electronic passport or ePassport was launched on 24 March 1998 and featured a microchip embedded in the back cover of the passport. The microchip, with a write-once format, was encoded with fingerprint and facial images and textual data. 

First-generation Malaysian e-passports contain an image of the passport holder’s thumbprint as the biometric instead of a photograph.

8Kbytes chip embedded in the back cover of the passport.
Textual data, photo image and thumbprint image encoded in the chip as one data file

Datapage laminated / Retroreflective lamination.

5,000,000 first generation
 
Published information suggests that it employs digital signatures (“passive authentication”). There appears to be no reliable public information on other security mechanisms, although the US patent filed on the technology suggests a “proprietary and secret” encryption algorithm is used for mutual authentication between e-passport and reader

Version II : Proprietary Biometric Passport Generation 2 / Model 1 (2002 - 2006)

On 17 December 2002, an upgraded biometric passport was introduced, replacing the fingerprint image with a fingerprint biometric template. The microchip was designed to write-many. 
Second generation ICAO e-passports may also store a thumbprint template, as well as a small amount of writable memory for storing recent travel locations.

In 2003, Passport with thumbprint biometric was launched, Maintain 8Kbytes size
Replacing the thumbprint image with a thumbprint biometric template
The chip was segmented to add a write many areas for recording a specified number of movement information

In addition to biometric data and the personal information stored on the information page, the chip also records the bearer's travel history of the last ten entry and exits at Malaysia border control points.
Malaysian e-passports record the travel history (time, date, and place) of entries and exits from the country.

Variety changes of the chip, Dec-2002
From December 2002, added thumbprint data to the biometric data set on the passport chip.
Datapage laminated / Retroreflective lamination.
implemented with a thumbprint biometric template replacing thumbprint image
extracted fingerprint information
 
Version III : Proprietary Biometric Passport Generation 2 / Model 2 (2006 - 2010)

New datapage format - MYS-AO-01001 (01/07/2006) Change of identity page
Datapage laminated / New lamination tech: Toppan

From 01/10/2009 Validity: 2-year and only available as 32-pages.

BIOMETRIC

There is facial recognition software used in the ePassport deployment. The facial characteristics in an applicant’s new passport photo are compared against facial images in the Dept of Immigration Malaysia’s database. 

The biometric data included on the Malaysian passport is a digital photograph of the bearer's face, and images of their two thumbprints.

It is the first proper biometric identification based human-to-computer authentication meant for the general masses.

LANGUAGES

The document was printed in Malay and English on the datapage (front endpaper), diplomatic request (page 1), page 3 (document's name, validity exception, total pages information), page 4 (observations) and page 32 (holder's signature).

Printed observations on page 31 are in English.

Frontpage and notes on the back cover were printed in Malay.

REQUEST PAGE
 
PERMITTED COUNTRIES
 
The real reason that the document is invalid for visiting Israel is that there is no diplomatic relations between Malaysia and Israel. Malaysia is one of 36 countries that do not recognize the statehood of Israel.

NOTES & REGULATIONS
   



 

Footnotes

1. ^{^} _, (1998, Mar 24), Dr Mahathir Launches Malaysian Passport With ID Chip. Utusan Malaysia. Available at http://ww1.utusan.com.my/utusan/info.asp?y=1998&dt=0324&pub=Utusan_Express&sec=Home_News&pg=hn_01.htm
2. ^{^} undefined
3. ^{^} 12th Session of the Facilitation Division: The Malaysian Electronic Passport (2004). Available at https://www.icao.int/Meetings/FAL12/Documents/Malaysia.pdf
4. ^{^} _, (?), ePassport Information - Malaysia. Security Document World. Available at http://www.securitydocumentworld.com/article-details/i/8570/
5. ^{^} US 6111506 A, Method of making an improved security identification document including contactless communication insert unit. Available at http://www.google.co.uk/patents/US6111506
6. ^{^} _, (2001, Mar 23), Smart passport holder denied entry into Seoul. Utusan Malaysia. Available at http://ww1.utusan.com.my/utusan/info.asp?y=2001&dt=0325&pub=Utusan_Express&sec=Front_Page&pg=fp_02.htm
7. ^{^} M. Krishnamoorthy, (2006, Jul 21), 2-hour passport: Fast service in Langkawi proves a success. The Star (Malaysia). Available at http://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2006/07/21/2hour-passport-fast-service-in-langkawi-proves-a-success