With Indicio Proven® Airside Workforce Credentials, you can instantly prove that your crew is authorized to access and repair. Verifiable credentials containing certifications, currencies, and training requirements deny access the moment they expire, and provide a cryptographically provable audit trail to protect airlines from insurance liability.
By Trevor Butterworth
While some credentials are issued for life, subject to suspension or revocation (for example, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration’s Airframe & Powerplant certificate), others begin expiring immediately upon issuance.
In the U.S., Inspection Authorization, which permits a mechanic to approve major repairs and return aircraft to service, renews every two years.
Recent experience requirements cover experience that needs to remain current, hence “currencies” for shorthand. Even the lifetime certificate carries a recency requirement: a mechanic cannot exercise its privileges unless they have worked under it for at least six months in the preceding two years.
And then there are proofs of recurrent training, medical certificates for pilots, drug-and-alcohol program currency, and airport-specific badges.
Managing this constant churn of expiry and renewal is laborious, and costly, not least when lapses and infractions lead to penalties.
The problem of proof by PDF
The underlying problem is the inherent inefficiency and risk of error in a pdf and spreadsheet process against an airport operator or airline’s need to continuously prove that an employee’s certs and qualifications haven’t expired or been revoked at the point of work.
Now think about the numbers involved in aircraft maintenance. For example, Delta Tech Ops, which operates the largest airline-owned Maintenance, Repair, Overhaul (MRO) facility in North America at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in Georgia, employs over 7,000 aviation maintenance technicians. That’s a lot of paperwork and a lot of compliance management.
Imagine every MRO had instant, tamper-evident proof of every technician’s certs, currencies, and training as they logged in for work each shift. Imagine that determining this proof required nothing more than a swipe or a tap, online or off, with no integration needed to a centralized server for confirmation. Each technician would be automatically warned in advance to renew; each missed renewal would invalidate their access at the moment of expiry.
This is what Indicio’s Airside Workforce Credentials do.
Indicio’s solution: portable cryptographic proof of identity bound to certifications
A verifiable credential is a way to hold and share data via a digital wallet on a mobile device or a wearable. It’s fully portable in the sense that the proof of the data’s origin and integrity — that it hasn’t been tampered with — travels with the data. There’s no need for a typical server integration to prove the data is what the issuer of the data really issued. Instead, the party verifying an identity or a certification performs cryptography on the data and the data either proves itself or doesn’t.
What it means in practice is that a technician can instantly prove their qualifications are up to date and that an MRO’s systems can instantly block any technician from working on an aircraft the moment a cert expires.
Each verification creates a tamper-proof, time-stamped confirmation that the credential was valid at that moment. So, if an airline makes an insurance claim on a damaged aircraft, it can prove to the insurer that everyone who worked on the aircraft prior to the damage was certified to do so, thereby mitigating the risk of the insurer denying the claim.
Similarly, the MRO has the same protection and same record of integrity when it comes to the risk of employees falsifying their certification.
Better access management for every employee
Another advantage to using verifiable credentials for managing employees is that their identity can be tied to their certifications and qualifications. Passes get shared, borrowed, and lost, and a missing badge can keep working long after the person has gone. A credential bound to its rightful holder cannot be shared or handed on, and a lost or expired one is revoked immediately. Again, the operator gets real-time control of who goes where, alongside a defensible record of who was current when the work was done.
For additional security, authenticated biometrics can be incorporated in the identity part of credential issuance. Because the worker holds all their personal data, including their biometrics, in their device or wearable, operators and airlines don’t have to worry about storing that data or the security and privacy requirements that come with centralized storage.
Do it now before the deluge
There’s an additional reason to implement verifiable credential technology for airside operations: increasing turnover. Boeing’s 2026 outlook estimates that 728,000 new maintenance technicians will be needed globally over 20 years, with two-thirds of hires replacing departing workers. This is not the kind of churn you want to be managing on a spreadsheet.
Simplify and secure airside operations with Indicio
Indicio is leading the market in verifiable credential solutions for airlines and borders, and we’ve adapted the same battle-tested technology for airside operations. It is a straightforward system the operator controls, works with your existing infrastructure, and is globally interoperable.
To see how verifiable credential technology can transform airside operations, contact Indicio for a 30-minute walkthrough.
Indicio makes proving identity simple. It gives people a faster way to prove who they are, and gives the organizations that serve them a cheaper, safer way to be sure. Indicio is an analyst award-winning company serving customers across travel, banking, hiring, and government, in production at national scale today.
