Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) optimized its international boarding process with the recent deployment of one of the largest biometrics installations in North America.
LAX and Easier deployed 52 SkyLanes in the new Bradley West Gates and 24 SkyLanes in the existing gates at Tom Bradley International Terminal. Under the contract, a total of 128 SkyLanes will be deployed with possible expansions in other terminals.
Instead of showing a boarding pass to an agent, these automated gates use biometric information to scan travelers and identify them while providing a self-service experience boarding a plane. Once the information is verified by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the gate automatically opens and allows the passenger to board.
Agents are freed from scanning barcode tickets, which allows them more flexibility to assist travelers with other needs.
“It's a very efficient process,” said Herve Muller, head of North America for Easier. “It's a great passenger experience, especially post-COVID because it's touchless. You don't have to interact with an agent, you don't have to touch the equipment. The camera takes your picture and you board your plane with a smile.”
Easier works with IDEMIA to provide a biometrics solution. Muller said IDEMIA did the biometric enrollment of the entire population of India, so it's very much proven biometric technology.
Airlines, airport and Easier do not keep any private passenger information and biometric matching is done by CBP in the cloud. U.S. citizens have the option of opting out of the facial image capture and may be processed by airline agents with a passport and boarding pass.
The LAX deployment comes on the heels of a two-year pilot program to validate the technology before awarding the deployment contract to Easier.
The easier system uses unicity detection, which not only identifies the passenger but also ensures only one person can go through the gate at a time.
“You want to make sure that you've got the right number of passengers on the plane. If you don't, then the airline has got to go do a recount and count everybody on the plane individually and you may have seen that happening on some flights and generally that means flight delays,” Muller said. “Being able to really have full security as you go through the gate and knowing exactly how many passengers have gone through is one of the important features of the SkyLane.”
More than 50 airlines will use the gates, so Muller said it was important to have common-use software to allow any of them to access the SkyLane.
“That's one of the main challenges for deployment of that scale. It's the largest in the U.S. to date and probably the largest number of individual airlines that will use biometric technology,” Muller said. “A lot of them it will be the first time that some of these airlines have ever used biometric technology and some of them have never used self-boarding gates.”
Installation took place during COVID as Easier and other stakeholders coordinated the project along with varying renovations at LAX. The company had to coordinate with international airlines with varying experience in biometrics during a period where they couldn’t enter the country due to the pandemic.
Muller said LAX has measured a 40 percent improvement of boarding time utilizing the system.
“The technology works very well. The gates work well, no challenge,” Muller said. “There is a lot of coordination still with the airlines to train their agents and get them familiar with the technology, but from the passenger standpoint, we think that the experience has been very positive.”
The pandemic is hastening the implementation of biometrics systems in the U.S. The technology is mature but Muller said it’s important to ensure any potential system at your airport must have a software that will work with all of your airlines.
The technology could eventually cover domestic flights as well and the industry will come closer to a goal of a completely touchless end-to-end journey through the airport.
“The United States, in terms of the use of self-boarding gate has been behind the rest of the world. So if you go to a an airport in France and Germany and Japan, Asia, Europe, etc., you'll see much more automation at the boarding gate down in the United States,” Muller said. “We think that this technology is going to create much more appeal for automating the boarding process.”
