the United States after a cramped flight from abroad is a long wait to clear passport control.

More and more business travellers -- Americans and foreigners alike -- press a hand to a computer screen and are on their way.

In an experimental programme, more than 45,000 travellers are using an Immigration and Naturalisation Service Passenger Accelerated Service System card, or INSPASS, to get through the process quickly.

That is twice as many as last year, according to agency spokeswoman Eileen Schmidt.

"The process takes about 15 to 20 seconds,'' compared with a 20-minute average wait at regular immigration control, she said.

The traveller runs a card through a machine in the airport and places a hand in a "hand geometry reader.'' The computer compares the live scan of the bone structure in the hand to an image that was taken when the traveller applied for the pass. Sometimes the computer asks for the flight number.

On average, more than 20,000 automated admissions into the US are made a month. At the INS office at Washington Dulles International Airport in the capital's suburbs, John Guyer was busy filling out the application form for the new system.

He had started his trip 38 hours ago in Perth, Australia, and had two hours to spare before his flight to Richmond, Virginia, took off.

Guyer became curious as he waited in line for the passport control and noticed other passengers pass him by.

Bermuda business travellers are eligible to apply for INSPASS "I'm in line and everyone else is putting in these cards,'' he said. "I travel a lot for business and it seemed like a good idea. Sometimes there is a line as far as the eye can see.'' Citizens of the United States, Canada, Bermuda and the 29 countries participating in the Visa Waiver Pilot Programme are eligible to apply for the pass.

Applicants must travel to the United States on business at least three times a year.

"We identified the frequent travellers as low-risk passengers, people we know who they are,'' Schmidt said. "It also helps our enforcement efforts; our inspectors have more time to focus on other travellers.'' The INS has checked more than 10,000 travellers admitted with the security card since the programme began in 1993 and found no cases of fraud.

Terrorism expert William Daly is not surprised. The biometric image of the hand's bone structure and configuration is an extremely reliable way of determining the identity of a person -- much more so than the picture in a passport, he said.

"It's becoming more of an industry standard, because biometric standard is much more difficult to forge,'' said Daly, managing director of a security consulting firm. "It's a very good system, and the more you use it the better it becomes.'' The goal is to make the pass available to frequent business travellers from nearly all nations, but not to anyone else.

But Daly couldn't see any security reason why students, visitors and other frequent travellers to the United States couldn't be included in the system.

So far, six international airports -- Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, New Jersey; John F. Kennedy in New York, San Francisco and Dulles -- provide the INSPASS service, as well as the US preclearance sites at Vancouver and Toronto in Canada.

The international airports in Seattle and Honolulu will get the service next year.

Although the INS plans to install security card machines at an additional 13 airports, no expansion is scheduled immediately due to budget constraints. The cities are Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Dallas-Fort Worth, Detroit, Houston, Minneapolis, Montreal, Orlando, Ottawa, St. Louis and one that has not been identified.

The 29 nations participating in the Visa Waiver Pilot Programme are: Andorra, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brunei, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, San Marino, Singapore, Spain, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK.