NEW YORK — German airline Hahn Air, which offers scheduled and charter flights within Europe, announced on Monday it has issued the first airline tickets enabled by blockchain technology, in partnership with Winding Tree, an open-source travel distribution platform. Blockchain, which first emerged as the system powering bitcoin, is a shared database maintained by a network of computers. Hahn Air on Monday flew passengers holding blockchain-powered tickets on its scheduled flight from Dusseldorf to Luxembourg. The first blockchain passengers are Maksim Izmaylov, Founder of Winding Tree; Dave Montali, chief information officer of Winding Tree; and Frederick Nowotny, Head of Sales Engineering at Hahn Air. "For us, it is important to look into the future to understand how can we make distribution faster," Jörg Troester, Hahn Air's head of corporate strategy and government & industry affairs, told Reuters in a phone interview.

Source: New York Times November 18, 2019 14:03 UTC