Travellers arriving at Bristol Airport are being encouraged to skip the lines at border control and use new facial recognition gates instead.
The system does a quick scan of travellers' faces and compares them to the digital photo held on the chip embedded in new e-passports. If it all matches up, the automated gates swing open to allow the person through, with no other checks needed.
The system can only be used by UK or European travellers who are over the age of 18 and have one of the new e-passports that come with a chip. Some 17 million of the passports have been doled out so far. The gates have been in use at Manchester and Stansted since 2008, and have scanned half a million flyers. The Bristol gates have been in use since 26 August, and the government plans to install the system in 10 other UK airport terminals bay the end of the year.
The airport's terminal general manager Alison Roberts noted it could make air travel less of a pain. She said in a statement that the "use of new technology can help improve today's passenger experience, providing a positive first impression to visitors arriving in the UK."
UK Border Agency chief executive Lin Homer stressed that the tech can make borders more secure, and said that the 1.2 billion electronic borders programme will let his agency count all air travel movement in and out of the UK by 2014.
