Vision-Box Installs eGates at Ezeiza Airport

Multinational technology company, Vision-Box, has deployed its Seamless Journey Platform in the new terminal at Ezeiza, Argentina’s largest international airport by passenger numbers.

The newly installed platform consists of 14 biometric-enabled self-service pre-security eGates expediting automated boarding pass control for both domestic and international flights. The new assets have been integrated with existing Vision-Box Border Control and Passenger Processing Solutions at Ezeiza Airport and Aeroparque Jorge Newbery, an international airport 2km northwest of Buenos Aires.

The deployment of Vision-Box’s technology will reduce wait times at security and border controls, helping ensure a smoother journey. The solution is also aligned with the airport’s sustainability goals, reducing the need for paper-based boarding passes, and contributing to an eco-friendlier operation.

‘Our goal is to provide the best possible experience for our passengers, making Ezeiza International Airport the most modern and technologically advanced airport in Latin America. We believe that the combination of a state-of-the-art seamless travel platform with a passenger-centric focus are among the key factors in achieving our objectives of sustainability,’ said Sebastián Villar Guarino, Ezeiza International Airport General Manager.

In a hopefully unrelated incident, passengers flying into the UK have faced long delays at passport controls as eGates across the country failed, causing a ‘nationwide border system issue’. The disruption lasted a full day over a Bank Holiday weekend and was caused by an IT issue.

Typically, 60-80% of passengers normally entering the larger airports in the UK (Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester) would go through eGates, speeding up checks by using facial recognition to verify a traveller’s identity as they pass through. When the system goes down, as it did on a national level in the UK, all passengers have to be assessed at physically manned inspection desks.

The drive to automation, which brings many benefits to traveller safety and convenience, has been accompanied by an attendant reduction in levels of document inspectors at UK Border Force who operate passport control including the eGates. Inevitably, during the recent system failure, and despite Border Force’s claims that it had ‘robust plans in place’, there was insufficient capacity to handle 100% visual inspection of travel documents and long queues started to form very quickly.

Here is just another example of where machines-replacing-humans in the area of identity and secure document management provides many benefits in terms of efficacy and convenience and works great... until it doesn’t.

The lack of system-resilience in the face of IT failures, which admittedly are not common, demonstrates the importance of having physical backups in terms of security documents, and the humans who inspect them.