Dubai: Passengers arriving at or departing from Terminal 3 at Dubai International Airport will not need to wait in long queues from September.
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,” said Brigadier Talal Ahmad Al Shanqeti, General Director Assistant of Airport Passport Sector in GDRFA-Dubai.
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.