Tuesday, November 5, 2019
Biometric boarding pilot is going to be introduced by Air France and Paris Airports early next year which is going to use facial recognition to improve the travel experience and speed up the boarding procedure.
Air France and another airline are going to integrate the system in place of boarding cards at Paris Orly Airport on three regular flights.
Facial recognition feature has already been deployed at the border crossing at the Paris Airport. The airport has also started experimenting with the use of a biometric card.
The country’s privacy regular CNIL had set a few requirements before giving the green light for Air France’s project such as capturing only individual faces and not using the database for commercial purposes.
The information collected is supposed to be destroyed after the airport takes off. There will be no retention and the passenger, who must give his/her consent, will have to repeat the procedure at each pass at the airport.
The main objective is a biometrics scale in Paris airports so that in 2024, 2025 marks the end-to-end journey.
To lessen border queues, the number of facial recognition systems for automatic passport control has tripled from 37 in 2018 to 102. The government is willing to reduce waiting times for international flights to up to 45 minutes, and to 30 minutes for Schengen. The new technology will be able to process 300 passes per hour against 150 for the older generation at Orly Airport.
A number of airlines and airports have introduced biometric boarding in 2019 including at Norwegian Air at LAX, Emirates airline at Washington Dulles International Airport and Brazilian airline GOL.
