Airline passenger news and views

It is a familiar airport situation: it's late at night and your flight has landed on time. You hurry up through the corridors thinking you'll be able to catch the last train. Then you get to the border control and realise how pointless, frustrating and worthless everything is.

If this nightmarish scenario looks exaggerated, is because it is increasingly becoming a memory. And those apocalyptic queues resembling humanitarian aid distribution points during the Balkan wars are now a thing from the past thanks to an unlikely hero: the ePassport.

According to Gatwick Airport more passengers travelling to the UK via their terminals are opting to use the hi-tech facial recognition gates to clear border control.

The same gates that used to be deserted a while ago because no many people had the ePassport are now the smooth and fluid path of choice into the country, since more than 17 million biometric passports have been issued in the UK since their introduction in 2006.

They were used by 289,604 passengers between April 2010 and the end of March 2011, an average of 24,133 per month in Gatwick's North Terminal. But since April 1 this year until the end of July an average of 43,068 passengers have used the e-Passport gates each month.

To use them you place your feet on the footprints marked on the floor and slide your passport onto a scanner. Then you look into a camera and this compares the details of your face, such as the distance between your eyes and nose, to the details encoded on the chip embedded in your ePassport.

If everything is OK a set of glass doors opens and you are allowed through the border. Otherwise you will be sent to an alternative channel to have your passport checked by a (human) officer.

"By using the latest technology such as e-Passport gates at Gatwick we are providing a secure and convenient self-service alternative to the conventional border to allow passengers with a biometric passport to pass through the border securely," said Carole Upshall, UK Border Agency director Border Force South and Europe.

The gates can be found at border control at the following airports: Birmingham Terminals 1&2, Bristol, Cardiff, East Midlands, Gatwick North & South, Luton, Manchester Terminals 1&2, Heathrow T1, T3, T4, and T5 and Stansted.

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