Amsterdam Schiphol Airport has been working towards making the passenger experience at the airport as easy as possible, with its long-term goal to make travel paperless through their Seamless Flow program. The first phase will be a trial run of facial recognition self-boarding: the passengers who want to participate will have to have their passport and boarding pass scanned at the special registration kiosks, along with a high-quality picture of their face to get a single token. 

Seamless Flow is being brought to life because of the partnership by the Dutch Government, Schiphol Airport, Cathay Pacific, KLM and Vision-Box, the company that will be developing this technology platform. This self-boarding technology is completely passenger-oriented so that they can pass through the checkpoints at the airports with less hassle. This facial recognition program was also tried and tested with KLM flight passengers in 2017 for three months. This time, after a few months, they want to introduce this for passport control as the second phase.

How would the facial recognition work?

Passengers will be able to go through a boarding gate without having to present any travel documents. They will have to a camera that will scan their face at the departure gate, a biometric-enabled eGate. The photo that the camera captures will be compared with the one taken at the registration kiosk, and if it is a match, the passenger can pass through and is on the airline system.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? If you are running late to catch that flight, this system would make it easier for you to rush to your gate to make your flight.

The biometric data of the passenger will be deleted after 24 hours, and will be encrypted, stored and managed by the Seamless Flow Platform. The biometric information and passport data will be shared with the Koninklijke Marechaussee (KMar), the arm of the military responsible for performing military and civil police duties, to keep a check on the registration and monitor the border procedure. The information from the boarding pass will be verified by the airlines to make sure of seamless boarding. All the data will be processed by Schiphol’s central security systems. The airport transitioned into a central security system in 2015, and uses five central checkpoints.

Did you already participate in the KLM facial recognition trial phase? How was it? If you didn’t, would you like to? Let us know in the comments what you think of the Seamless Flow program!