Episode Details

When you fly, your passenger data travels through two separate systems: Advance Passenger Information (API) drawn from your passport, and the Passenger Name Record (PNR) pulled from the airline's reservation database. They serve different masters, use different formats, and reveal different things about you. This episode takes both apart field by field, from the machine-readable zone to the unstructured remarks field, and explores the 1980s-era wire format that still moves your data across borders.