BORDER SECURITY Contactless Borders: fast-forwarding to a ‘Seamless traveller’ future Biometrics-enabled ‘seamless traveller’ initiatives were once seen as the answer to handling ever-increasing passenger volumes at airports. In the post-Covid era, writes Nicholas Dynon, they present a potential enabler for Covid-safe air travel. The International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) estimates that by the end of 2020, the global Covid-19 impact on international passenger traffic could reach reductions of up to 71 percent of seat capacity and up to 1.5 billion passengers. Airlines and airports face a potential loss of revenue of up to a staggering USD 314 billion and USD 100 billion respectively for 2020. And the losses are set to continue even after countries re-open for travel as concerns over international borders as entry-points for Covid-19 make way for perceptions of passenger aircraft and airports as captive hothouses of transmission.
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Even with strict cleaning protocols in place, handing travel documents for inspection and touching surfaces through check-in, aviation security, border control, boarding gate and aboard aircraft will pose significant infection risk for travellers. Aircraft and airports will be perceived by pandemic-shaken publics as globalised petri dishes of disease for some time to come. According to a 11 June report in BiometricUpdate.com, Abu Dhabi International Airport has recently deployed touchless gesture recognition technology to 53 elevators to prevent the spread of Covid-19 through shared surfaces in its terminals.
The Touchless Keypad Technology developed by United Arab Emirates (UAE) company Meta Touch consists of a touchless control panel that enables users to indicate the desired floor or direction they want to go in by waving a hand. UAE’s Abu Dhabi-based Etihad Airlines has also recently installed biometric kiosks to screen for symptoms of illness, which builds on an existing Etihad project for deploying biometrics for ‘seamless passenger’ journeys. But these are mere quick-fire, localised tech-enabled responses within a sector hit harder than most by the Covid-19 crisis, and for which only
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