May 29th - How eGates work... and why they break
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 29 May 2023
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When airport eGates work, they're wonderful! Step in, scan your passport and... whiz, you're through!
But that didn't quite happen on Friday night and Saturday when there were failings nationwide causing chaos for passengers trying to enter the country. So, how do these robotic border force agents work? And what happens when they go wrong?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's travel podcast with me Simon Calder. |
| 0:07.9 | It's bank holiday Monday the 29th of May and I hope that anybody who has caught up in Saturday's failure of the IT system that controls the Eates at British airports has now finally got through. |
| 0:25.5 | And I want to talk about, well, not quite what went wrong, but how the system works and why |
| 0:31.4 | it is particularly vulnerable. So, E-Gates have been with us really for the past decade and they've provided, whatever |
| 0:41.7 | you might think, a pretty good service. Here's how it works at bigger airports and of course |
| 0:48.0 | that includes Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Manchester and many others. |
| 0:55.2 | British travellers, as well as those from the European Union, from Switzerland, from Canada, the US, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Japan and South Korea can just come in to the UK with nothing more than the machine on which you plonk down your passport, |
| 1:16.2 | reading the chip inside it, having a look at your facial biometric and deciding whether, first of all, it's your passport, |
| 1:25.4 | secondly whether it's valid, thirdly that it's you standing |
| 1:29.0 | in front of them and fourth that you're not wanted by Interpol. |
| 1:34.3 | Very straightforward. |
| 1:35.7 | The transaction generally takes just a few seconds and is actually much more efficient than manual |
| 1:42.1 | processing. |
| 1:43.8 | Can't be used for children under 12. |
| 1:46.3 | That's because it is believed that faces change too much among younger children. |
| 1:53.6 | But for most nationalities, 12 and over family groups can go through quite happily. |
| 2:05.5 | It means that certainly 70% of all arrivals are processed in normal times through eGates and that means that the other 30% of |
| 2:14.0 | arriving passengers can be processed more thoroughly by fewer UK Border Force staff. |
| 2:20.3 | And the whole business model of UK Border Force is based on the fact that you will have a lot |
| 2:26.3 | of people, the majority of people coming through the eGates. Yeah, there's a little bit of scrutiny. |
| 2:32.5 | There are people watching. They're also analysing behaviour as well to see if there's anything untoward among people using the eGates. |
| 2:42.0 | But it's generally very slick and very straightforward until it goes wrong. |
... |
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