Biometric-driven airport gates gain ground

Biometrics-driven border controls in the United Kingdom are now well advanced, with a trial at London Stansted so successful, that the technology is now being rolled out at Heathrow Airport.

Speaking at the Biometrics 2010 conference in London last Wednesday, Cyrille Bataller, director of the advanced technology labs with Accenture, said that biometric-driven airport gate technology is still in its infancy, with only around 1,000 gates in active use worldwide.

Despite this, he said that trials of the technology at London Stansted have proven that biometric reader gates are very efficient.

“To date, however, many of the world’s biometric border gates have involved business travellers, but the long-term aim is to get all travelers using this technology”, he said.

This, he explained, is due to the enormous cost efficiencies that automated biometric gates generate for airports.

Infosecurity reports that on the London Stansted trial, which has been running for twelve months, the airport saw half a million people using the system and 77 percent of users traversing the gates in under ten seconds.

With a manual border gate, Batiller says, an average of 240 passengers can be handled, compared to 360 passengers using an automated biometrics-driven gate.

With six gates in a bank, he told his audience, it only takes 1.9 people to work on the gates, as most users go through on a self-service basis.

With 10 percent of these users requiring manual intervention, that makes biometric-driven border gates 4.74 times more efficient than the manual system. This, he says, translates to a 90 percent cost saving for biometrics-driven border gates when compared to people-based border controls.

“If we draw parallels with the rollout of ATMs at banks, I think you’re going to see biometrics-driven gates becoming the norm,” he said, adding that it is also worth noting that the manual process is less than perfect from a security point of view.