New Screening Technology

By the end of the summer some airline passengers will be screened with a new cutting edge facial recognition technology rather than individual checks by passport officers. The pilot project will be open to UK and EU citizens holding new biometric passports. The changes are an attempt to improve security and ease congestion.

The unmanned clearance gates will be phased in to scan passengers’ faces and match the image to the record on the computer chip in their biometric passports. Security officials believe the machines can do a better job than humans of screening passports and preventing identity fraud.

There is concern that passengers will react badly to being rejected by an automated gate. In efforts to ensure no one on a police watch list is incorrectly let through, the technology will err on the side of caution and is likely to generate a small number of “false negatives” – which will result in some innocent passengers being rejected because the machines cannot match their appearance to the records.

These will be redirected to conventional passport queues, or there may be security officers on hand authorized to override automatic gates following additional checks.

Existing biometric, fast-track travel security programes such as Iris and MiSense – now operate at several UK airports, but are aimed at business travelers who enroll in advance. The rejection rate in trials of Iris recognition which operates by means of the unique images of each traveler’s eye, is 3% to 5%, although some were passengers who were not enrolled but jumped into the queue.

Automated gates are intended to help the government’s progress to establishing a comprehensive advance passenger information (API) security system that will eventually enable flight details and identities of all passengers to be checked against a security watch list.