Biometric boarding

[davidjohnson6]

A number of airlines and airports seem to be running trials (or will be in the next few months) involving face recognition boarding. Clearly this is about drastically reducing or even eliminating the cost of having ground staff at a gate.

Everything says how it will be voluntary... but unless the trials meet huge public resistance, you can be certain those voluntary single route trials will be deployed on all routes and flying will become more difficult for those pax who decline to take part.

Would anyone involved in this be able to say what's planned to happen by 2024 or 2025 ?

[Asturias56]

How are you going to avoid "taking part"?

They'll just tell you to take part or else turn round and get off

[PAXboy]

I can see the promo video: all smooth camera movements, the equipment clean and glistening. The voice tells you how much simpler your journey is going to be. Naturally,when you look nicely into the machine, placing your thumbprint in exactly the right place, it works perectly.

Whilst not a direct comparison: In the years since machine read passports were introduced, I only get straight through 50% of the time.

Lastly, when using EZY last month, I saw 3 Auto Bag Drop machines monitored by 3 humans ...

[Asturias56]

" I saw 3 Auto Bag Drop machines monitored by 3 humans ..."

But "Monitoring" is so much easier than actually having to touch the bags and talk to the their owners!

As for fingerprint recognition I reckon it has doubled the time I spend at Singapore and US immigration

[DaveReidUK]

The way these things always work is that there will be an agreed success:fail criteria that needs to be achieved in order for the system to proceed beyond the trials stage.

When it becomes clear that the agreed target will never be achieved, the goalposts will be quietly moved to be just below the actual achieved performance ...

[PAXboy]

Correct DRUK. If the desired result will save money - it will happen. Even if it only saves money on paper. But that is another long and bitter discussion for, if the paperwork says that it saves money? Must be true. Does it irritate the hell out of your customers and cause some to go away? That will never be measured or known.