What Delays Airlines’ Use of Technological Innovations?

As a Qantas Frequent Flyer, I was informed in a recent email of the conclusion of Qantas’s trial “giving eligible customers the option to use our innovative new facial recognition technology across key international airports in our network to get you on your way as seamlessly, securely and quickly as possible.” More than 1500 fliers at Brisbane Airport “registered to use their face as a boarding pass to enter the lounge and board their flights. More than 150 flights departed with customers using facial recognition technology at the boarding gate.” The customers needed to have an Android phone, download an app, and use it to upload details from a biometric, chip-encoded passport. Qantas will use their feedback to “shape the future airport experience.” The innovation, according to Qantas is that “it allows customers to securely store their passport details on their mobile phone which is matched to their face via cameras while moving through the airport.”

The Brisbane trial comes five years after Qantas trialed an apparently very similar app at Sydney Airport. In that trial, proposed as “couch-to-gate” biometrics, customers could download an app and use their face as access identification to automate check-in, bag drop, lounge access and boarding. According to Sydney Airport CEO Geoff Culbert,

In the future, there will be no more juggling passports and bags at check-in and digging through pockets or smartphones to show your boarding pass—your face will be your passport and your boarding pass at every step of the process.

But while it allowed “our lounge staff” to “create a more personalised experience when passengers arrive,” the app did not lead to any changes to airport security or border-processing procedures.

I was intrigued about the time gap between the two trials, and even more so by the irony that using biometric data for border control processing procedures has been de rigueur at Brisbane Airport since 2007, when SmartGate was introduced by the Australian Border Force. SmartGate uses a photograph stored on a chip in an ePassport to automatically verify photographically that the person at the gate is the passport owner. This service is now offered for Australians and a wide range of other ePassport holders (including United States citizens) at all Australian international airports.   

The airline appears to be lagging behind the government bureaucracy by nearly 20 years in the use of biometric identification technology. Might that possibly be because the government can compel the use of biometric data for passports, but its use by airlines is voluntary, meaning there is no real reduction in airline costs as both human and electronic processes must operate in tandem indefinitely? Given that the airlines must make substantial investments in camera technology to make the new systems work, the incentives to push their use appear weak.

There is a similar airline-tech conundrum with dot matrix printers at boarding gates. On a recent overseas trip, I had the opportunity to observe them at airports across Africa, Asia, Australia, and Europe including in some of the newest airports in countries priding themselves on their standards of digital sophistication. Dot matrix printers use a fixed number of pins or wires arranged in vertical columns that strike an ink-coated ribbon to make a small dot on the paper. The combination of these dots forms an image—for example, a letter symbol. These printers were ubiquitous from the 1970s until the late 1990s, when they were largely replaced in general use by inkjet and laser printers. The advantage of the latter two is they can print on standard sheets of paper. Dot matrix printers require tractor-feed paper with sprocket holes at the edges that fit over printer prongs that roll the paper through as the pins print on it. The paper comes in folded stacks usually with perforations that allow the paper to be separated into individual sheets once printed.

The continued justification for dot matrix printers, for international flights at least, appears to be pilots’ obligations to provide signed copies of literal “paperwork” in order to meet various regulations in different countries. Furthermore, identical copies, each signed individually by the (separately) responsible crew member, frequently must be provided to different authorities for the same flight. The unique benefit of dot matrix printing is that its physical action enables the production of carbon copies, just like an old typewriter. They are also very cost-effective for printing multiple copies of the same document. Hence, these printers still perform a useful function in specific use cases, notably transportation, in which multiple copies of the same manifest documentation are required.

To be fair, airlines are moving to tablets when possible, particularly for domestic flights (where documentation obligations are less stringent) and in-flight service management. But sometimes, the “old ways” are just more cost-effective, given regulatory requirements.