New smart gates set to cut queues at Dubai airport

Dubai: Come September, say goodbye to long queues for passengers arriving at or departing from Terminal 3 at Dubai International Airport. Travellers will no longer need to stop at passport control for the most part thanks to new-generation smart gates being installed in the weeks ahead at one of the world’s busiest airports, said authorities. Twenty-five new-generation smart gates will negate the need for personal encounters with passport control officers thanks to new face-recognition software that will clear travellers who present approved biometric, electronic passports or identification to walk straight to the baggage claim area after deplaning. With an increase every year in passengers using Dubai’s air hub every year, the General Directorate of Residency and Foreigners Affairs (GDRFA) is installing the new gates in Terminals 1,2,3 as well as at Maktoum International Airport, to be completed by the first quarter of 2018. “The new generation of the smart gates will replace all the current gates by first quarter of 2018. For the moment, we will have 25 smart gates at the departure hall in Terminal 3 by beginning of September. It is the face of the future for the first time in the world — passengers will cross the gates smoothly and there will be no need to stand in queues to get the passport stamped,” Brigadier Talal Ahmad Al Shanqeti, General Director Assistant of Airport Passport Sector in GDRFA-Dubai told Gulf News. Fifteen of the new smart gates are for economy class travellers while the remaining are for business and first-class passengers. The smart gates ensure that each traveller will only spend 9 to 20 seconds to pass through. At the moment, about 20 per cent of travellers use smart gates in Dubai and GDRFA aims to step that up to 50 per cent [of travellers] in the near future, he added. “Emiratis and residents [comprise] 45 per cent of the travellers in Dubai. Our target is to have people cross the smart gates in an easy and fast way,” Brig. Al Shanqeti said. The biometric tunnels that scan people’s faces as they walk to baggage reclaim will be white in colour and a light will come on when the passenger goes through them. The “biometric border” walkway takes a 3D scan of people’s faces as they enter the airport and checks it against a digital passport using face-recognition software. “Travellers can walk through the smart gates by either using their biometric passports or Emirati ID. Since we activated the use of Emirati ID to cross the gates on July 2016, around 555,857 travellers have used them,” he said. The digital passport, created for the system, contains information from the electronic chip in physical passports, as well as additional details including fingerprints, iris scans and face-recognition data. Major Khalid Al Felasi, Assistant General Director of Smart Services in GDRFA-Dubai, told Gulf News that the new gates represent a new era for passengers. “Dubai is always looking for new ideas that have never been implemented before in the world. Dubai Airport is number one in the world and the new smart gates are unique. A traveller’s face will be scanned so when he returns, [through facial recognition], the gates will open without the need to take fingerprints or examine the passport. This is the future,” Maj Al Felasi said. He said the gates will be installed at T3 Departures to supplement the existing e-gates, and manned immigration counters. “It will also enable travellers to forgo the additional step of getting their passports and boarding passes manually checked by a security officer before they go through immigration, as these checks will be automatically integrated within the biometric validation as travellers pass through the new smart gates,” Major Al Felasi added. Children under 15 will not be able to avail of the new smart gates. An officer will attend to their procedures at the normal gates.