GMR’s Hyderabad Rajiv Gandhi International Airport will be introducing face recognition technology to usher in select passengers quickly through the transit without the mandatory physical frisking and patting, within the next few months.
Airport authorities are taking up trial runs with its own staff and those of other airlines and in about “three to four months” pilot runs are also to be taken up with passengers volunteering for the same, according to Chief Executive Officer S.G.K. Kishore.
“Hyderabad and Bengaluru airports have been cleared by the Government of India to introduce new technologies like face recognition to make air travel seamless under the ‘Digiyatra’. We will roll out the facility once we complete all the pilot studies so that we can come out with a robust solution,” he said, in a recent interaction.
The plan is to bring in ‘algorithms’ which will give prior information to the security agencies stating that a particular individual is ‘clean’ or ‘safe’. “Once we get more data we can focus on the real problem areas rather than doing the current physical patting process,” he said.
One-time enrolment
Initially, it is to be made applicable to frequent flyers seeking quick transit into the airport following a simple one-time enrolment process. It will be optional for passengers as the other physical checks will continue to be in vogue for those not keen. Gradually, more passengers can opt for the new technology.
The CEO pointed out that the Shamshabad airport has been pioneering several innovative measures in the last two years like dispensing with hand baggage tags, stamping and scanning of boarding passes, and the third-level effort is to do away with paper related documentation.
“Our express security check-in received a good feedback from our domestic passengers. We want to bring in incremental technological intervention because suddenly removing manual verification process may be difficult for passengers and for the security people like CISF and others involved,” said Mr. Kishore.
The technology initiatives is also an effort to handle the growing passenger footfalls as in December last the airport saw the highest ever number of passengers at 19.3 lakh and on December 30 it had 540 air traffic movements, also a record since its inception.
Expansion plans
RGIA has embarked on a large-scale expansion project to increase the airport’s annual passenger handling capacity beyond 34 million. It has also registered a passenger footfall of about 20.90 million last year, which is up by 21% from the corresponding duration of the last calendar year.
In terms of domestic passengers, it had handled about 17.01 million or up by 23%, approximately 3.89 million international passengers or up by 12% from the corresponding period of the last calendar year. It is now among the top six airports in India handling over 60,000 passengers and 500 aircraft movements daily.
