What if you no longer needed to take out your ID to board a plane? This is the case in Lyon for certain flights, and it works very well.
All it takes is a few seconds on a terminal at the airport and remaining neutral, or at home directly on your phone, and off you go! No more need to check in with your ID, or present it at the airport: everything is done with facial recognition software. All you have to do is pre-register with your smartphone and then go through security checks or baggage drop-off.
A technology tested in Paris Charles-De-Gaulle, but also in Lyon for three years now. “That works !welcomes Ludovic Gas, director of operations at Lyon airport. Throughout the passenger journey and in particular throughout the boarding part, it is exactly the same system as here.”
“The passenger, always the same, hands in his pockets! He does not need to take out his papers, it is simply facial recognition which opens the doors and allows him access to the plane.”
Ludovic Gas, operations director at Lyon airportat franceinfo
The experiment remains limited for the moment to Saint-Exupéry airport: two to four flights per day on average are eligible with only three airlines, “Transavia, Air Corsica and TAP, with a range of destinations in Europe”specifies Ludovic Gas. “We are starting to be contacted by other airlines who, obviously, are very interested in setting up this service.” Civil aviation for the technical side, and the CNIL for the processing of personal data, are following these experiments very closely.
A faster route
30,000 passengers have used this system since the start of the experiment. Lyon airport highlights customer satisfaction of 4.9 out of 5. Main advantage: we go faster. “You avoid the whole part ‘I take out my boarding pass, I check the concordance between the boarding pass, the identity document’. This makes the passenger journey smoother and allows us to improve our operational performance for the airport but also for the airlines since this reduces boarding times”pleads the operations director.
So how far will this system grow? In Lyon, we don’t say too much. Currently, only flights within the European Union are eligible. Because beyond that, you have to deal with the law of each country. Nor are we saying here, as in Frankfurt, that it will soon be possible to pay for duty-free purchases using facial recognition.