Standards
The ICAO also standardizes certain functions for use in the airline industry, such as the Aeronautical Message Handling System (AMHS), making it a standards organization.
Each country should have an accessible Aeronautical Information Publication (AIP), based on standards defined by the ICAO, containing information essential to air navigation. Countries are required to update their AIP manuals every 28 days and so provide definitive regulations, procedures and information for each country about airspace and aerodromes. The ICAO's standards also dictate that temporary hazards to aircraft are regularly published using NOTAMs.
The ICAO defines an International Standard Atmosphere (also known as ICAO Standard Atmosphere), a model of the standard variation of pressure, temperature, density, and viscosity with altitude in the Earth's atmosphere. This is useful in calibrating instruments and designing aircraft.
ICAO standardizes machine-readable passports worldwide. Such passports have an area where some of the information otherwise written in textual form is written as strings of alphanumeric characters, printed in a manner suitable for optical character recognition. This enables border controllers and other law enforcement agents to process such passports quickly, without having to input the information manually into a computer. ICAO publishes Doc 9303 – Machine Readable Travel Documents, the technical standard for machine-readable passports. A more recent standard is for biometric passports. These contain biometrics to authenticate the identity of travellers. The passport's critical information is stored on a tiny RFID computer chip, much like information stored on smartcards. Like some smartcards, the passport book design calls for an embedded contactless chip that is able to hold digital signature data to ensure the integrity of the passport and the biometric data.
Another area in which the ICAO is active is infrastructure management, including Communication, Navigation, Surveillance / Air Traffic Management (CNS/ATM) systems, which employ digital technologies (e.g., satellite systems with various levels of automation) in order to maintain a seamless global air traffic management system.
Read more about this topic: International Civil Aviation Organization
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—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
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—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)