Berlin-Brandenburg Airport is testing “BER Traveller,” a digital biometric access control service with automated facial recognition. Currently, only frequent flyers in the Lufthansa Group, including Swiss, Austrian and Brussels Airlines, Eurowings, and the parent airline, can use the service without a boarding card. Holders of Senator and “Honorary” status are entitled to use the service and come to the security check in a preferred lane without having to queue. A prerequisite for participation is a one-time registration and personal biometric data saved in a special app provided by Dutch provider, FastID.
Participating airlines have sent invitations by email, and sensitive information is stored decentrally in the passengers’ app. Their use of the service is entirely voluntary. Before each trip, authorized people who have registered in the app can decide whether to use the service for the next flight, at which point flight data and biometric identifiers will be encrypted, then transmitted to servers at the airport. The data remains exclusively in the passenger’s app, and information can be deleted at any time.
Verification takes place at process points using permanently installed cameras, comparing biometric passenger data from the app with facial images taken during boarding and security checks using FastID. In the future, the self-service machines and boarding at the gate and access to the Lufthansa lounge using facial recognition should be possible at BER. The partners did not specify a timetable for this.
Lufthansa aims to sustainably improve the travel experience of its passengers with biometric, contactless options, facilitating simpler and more efficient processes at airports. The airline did not disclose technical details and biometric solutions used in other airports. Previous reports indicate that Lufthansa passengers in Munich and Frankfurt can be identified using facial recognition technology, and the data is stored for a maximum of two hours after departure.
BER Traveler and other biometric solutions used by Lufthansa are not linked to the sovereign system EasyPass for border control. The federal police are using EasyPass at eight major city airports, including BER, with 255 control lanes in the form of e-gates. Biometric access control systems have been tested in Germany for around 20 years, and their increasing use would lead to habituation and practice on the part of the users in everyday life, which would lead to an improved recognition performance.
