The world’s first airport to require biometric boarding is set to arrive in 2025

As end-of-summer travel lines back up at TSA airport checkpoints in the U.S., one overseas airport is going all-in on a biometric passenger experience. The Smart Travel Project at Zayed International Airport in Abu Dhabi will involve biometric sensors at every airport identification checkpoint by 2025. Airport security and travel experts have generally cheered the move. “They are boldly moving forward in adopting facial recognition as the means to let travelers into their system, and I commend them for doing it,” said Sheldon Jacobson, an engineering and computer science professor at the University of Illinois. Jacobson has been studying airport security since the 1990s and helped the TSA develop its pre-screening program, which allows some travelers in the U.S. to skip the checkpoints. “Facial recognition is the future, and we will start to get intelligent with airport security and focus on the traveler rather than the items they bring. By doing that, you create a different paradigm,” Jacobson said. “What they are doing in Abu Dhabi is just the beginning, but it has to start somewhere.” Going completely paperless from the parking garage to your seat-back tray table is unnerving to some who wonder if a Crowdstrike-type outage could bring down fully electronic boarding systems and grind travel to a halt. But Jacobson says those are very rare events, and even if the system completely shut down because of an outage, the net benefits of a biometric travel experience over time will outweigh the costs.<br/>