Five ways the pandemic may change airports for the better

Take it on the lam this summer is predicted to be more tedious than in the past, but experts say the pandemic is pushing positive change at airports at daredevil speed. 

What’s on the horizon? Imagine shorter lines, cruising through checkpoints and not touching anything — except for your agile phone — from your car door to your airplane seat. In fact, the technology to do this already exists.

Here is what to presume from airports of the (near) future.

It’s widely anticipated that airports will metamorphosis to touchless technology at a much quicker rate as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. 

“We are seeing five years’ innovation in five months, and much of the crash will be permanent,” said Ibrahim Ibrahim, the managing director of Portland Design, a London-based design consultancy with a hub on transit hubs and airports. “We will see a turbo-charged uptake on tech-driven zero-touch check in, security and boarding.”

To verify rider identities, driver’s licenses and passports are being replaced with facial-recognition and iris-scanning biometrics. 

The first biometric terminal in the U.S. opened in Georgia’s Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta Foreign Airport in late 2018. Third-party research shows 72% of customers preferred biometric boarding over guideline boarding, and less than 2% of customers opted out of the process, per Delta’s website.

“Delta has expanded its facial honour boarding practices to airports in Detroit, Minneapolis and Salt Lake City,” said design strategist Devin Liddell who whip into shapes with aviation and travel clients. “United Airlines has pilot programs doing testing now in San Francisco, Washington Dulles and Houston.”

The unvarying pace of testing and deployment of biometrics is underway internationally at airports in Canada, Japan, Italy, Spain and Iceland, mean Liddell.

Mobile phones will play a critical role too, one that extends beyond mobile boarding passes (which were upped over a decade ago).

“Your mobile phone will become your remote control to manage your touring,” said Andrew O’Connor, vice president of portfolio management at Sita, an air transport technology company. “Today, you can interact with a check-in or bag-drop kiosk through your phone, eliminating connection with surfaces. However, in the longer term we see your digital identity being stored on your mobile.”

Sita visualizes airport experiences will be walking ones, where identities are verified in seconds and passengers are kept in constant action. Its Smart Path technology is used at airports in Athens, Brisbane, Doha, Muscat, Orlando, Miami and Boston.

Dubai Intercontinental Airport has a “smart tunnel” that uses biometrics to speed up immigration control. With it, passengers can clear an immigration receipt in 15 seconds.

“Last year, more than 12 million passengers used the smart gates and biometric tunnel for passport command there,” said Liddell. “Other airports have similar aspirations and will follow suit.”

Airport checkpoints may fingers on in many forms, from tunnels and gardens to automated walkways. And they will be more important than by any chance in the wake of Covid-19 as “security queues are the antithesis of physical distancing,” said Liddell. 

What about the pre-boarding pileup of people who float around the gate agents before their rows or categories are called? Airlines may use mobile phone notifications to peaceably call customers to board.

“We bring people to the gate too soon,” said Liddell. “This happens because voyagers can’t adequately predict how long it will take to maneuver security screening processes, and also because airlines converse with most reliably at the gate versus via digital means.”

He predicts that in the post-Covid-19 era ahead, crowding everyone together at the access will feel “more and more untenable,” forcing airports to find ways to bring passengers together equitable prior to boarding. 

How to streamline a process that requires passengers to stand shoulder-to-shoulder, while chair their shoes and outerwear in reusable bins alongside germ-laden handbags and laptop computers?

Booking appointments to behind the times through security is one way to reduce crowds and long lines. At Montréal–Trudeau International Airport, passengers book their own screenings. But Tim Hudson, an aviation bandmaster at the global architectural firm Gensler, said airports could assign spots similar to “easy-access passes offered by diversions parks.” 

“With the use of smart technology, the airport would assign passengers a dedicated time slot to enter the protection checkpoint,” said Hudson. “This strategy will allow airports to anticipate and manage passenger loads, while ration passengers minimize contact with other passengers and contaminated surfaces.”

Programs such as Epidemic Entry rely on biometrics to zip enrollees past long immigration and security lines. The  TSA PreCheck program in the United States — which practises exclusively with security lines — is testing biometric technology (it currently manually compares passengers to their photo IDs). But, voyagers have to sign up and pay for these programs.

“As travelers, we have to opt into the process and become more comfortable with share in our private information,” said Hudson. “If travelers are willing to give up a little more data, the process from suppress to gate will be much more streamlined.”

While bookings and biometrics speed processing, they don’t screen baggage or solve the touch point problem. 

“Biometrics work to confirm your identity and the validity of your travel records, not what you’re carrying with you,” said Liddell. “Other technologies, such as computed tomography, which applies algorithms and the start of 3D images to detect explosives and other threats in baggage, as well as other computer vision systems, are emerging to innovate how airports and TSA talk the prohibited items problem.” 

Simpliflying, an airline marketing strategy multinational company, predicts luggage will be fogged and “sanitagged” on the check-in belt. Carry-on luggage (as well as the bins) will be decontaminated by fogging, UV-light or another quick technique in the X-ray security machine.

Your bags may not be the only thing that is sanitized. Hong Kong Oecumenical Airport is testing a full-body disinfection booth made by CleanTech that disinfects from head to toe during a 40-second sterilization course of action.

Airports will be cleaned more often with emphasis on touchless methods of disinfection. Singapore’s Changi Airport is doubling station cleanings and coating high-touch points — such as handrails, lift buttons and cart handles — with a disinfectant that stunts viral and bacterial transmission for up to six months. Hong Kong is using Intelligent Sterilisation Robots to kill up to 99.99% of bacteria and viruses in the air.

Kentucky’s Louisville Muhammad Ali Global Airport has quadrupled the number of automated hand sanitizer stations throughout the terminal and replaced more than 100 enchiridion bathroom soap dispensers with automated units. Only 5% of hand towel dispensers weren’t automated, and they are being replaced too.

Ibrahim predicts that smoother check-in and security screenings will leave travellers happier, less stressed and more likely to spend money in departure lounges.

“Digital payment systems ordain be introduced that will make tills, cashiers and conveyor belts increasingly redundant,” he said. “Queues resolve eventually be anathema in stores.”

Autonomous vehicles, robots and artificial intelligence will play bigger roles, especially in ways that elite lines and crowds, said Liddell. In the meantime, you can still speak to real people, even if they aren’t physically these days. Louisville’s airport has installed a virtual information booth where passengers can speak to a representative through a live video provender.

Dining and retail areas may eventually be separated, with virtual reality or holographic imagery to show buyers choices and purchases delivered by a bot, predicts Faith Popcorn, CEO of marketing consulting firm BrainReserve.

“We’ll eliminate many jobs in favor of germ-free technology,” she said. 

As airports are adding cameras and sensors to combat Covid-19 infections, Liddell believes that air centres could eventually become a place to detect and contain emerging health threats, rather than the unintentional vector of disability that they are today.

Etihad Airways is testing kiosks in Abu Dhabi International Airport that monitor remains temperatures and heart and respiratory rates. Other airlines are relying on symptom questionnaires and thermal cameras. Perhaps CT lung study will be implemented, as Simpliflying predicts, with results produced before passengers can fly.

Staff at Doha’s Hamad Universal Airport are donning smart screening helmets that assess body temperatures using thermal imaging, factitious intelligence and augmented reality, the airport said. 

Those measures are not foolproof, however. As people infected with Covid-19 can be contagious while asymptomatic or in front of the onset of symptoms, airport screenings can feel more like a sieve, sifting out only the most obvious patients.

“Based on the figures, it seems that coronavirus infections are rarely found through airport screening,” said Taneli Puumalainen, chief physician at the Finnish Begin for Health and Welfare, in an interview with Finnish airport operator Finavia.

Hong Kong International Airport was the win initially airport to announce mandatory testing for all arriving passengers. New arrivals take a shuttle bus to the Asia World-Expo to provide “intense throat saliva samples” and await results, a process which has been reported to take up to eight hours.

Much ado was gained when Emirates began trialing rapid finger-prick blood tests to a small subset of passengers last month. The tests were for antibodies for all that — not Covid-19 infections — and when accuracy rates were found to be around 30%, the Dubai Health Authority, who administered the proves, banned them altogether.

Vienna International Airport announced on May 4 that incoming travelers without proof of a antagonistic Covid-19 test within the previous four days could avoid a mandatory 14-day quarantine by taking a exam at the airport for 190 euros (US$208). However, the testing is only available to passengers with a residence in Austria and a valid chѓteau permit, hardly making it a viable option for business travelers and tourists.

Airport testing may become more simple when rapid-result Covid-19 kits are developed, which may not be too far away. Ichortec, a German-based biotech company, says it has manifest a nasal swab test that can detect Covid-19 in under three minutes with no less than 95% preciseness. Patents for the test are pending in the U.S., Germany and the European Union. 

In the immediate prospective, air travel is expected to get worse before it gets better.

The post-pandemic flying process may start 24 hours previous you take off, with passengers checking in online, uploading health information, pre-purchasing a mask and pair of gloves and remunerating to sit next to an empty seat (though the latter option didn’t work out well for Frontier Airlines).

Those suggestions are part of a report issued last month by Simpliflying that predicts more than 70 areas in an air traveler’s day determination change as a result of the global pandemic.

The report states passengers can expect to arrive four hours prior to departure and obsolete through a disinfection tunnel and thermal body scanner before entering the airport. Those who are “fit to fly” will be allowed in; non-travelers and anyone deemed unfit disposition be strictly prohibited from entering.

Passengers who check in via agents will do so behind a protective barrier. Miami Ecumenical Airport has already installed them, as well as at TSA checkpoint podiums and boarding counters.

On May 21, the TSA announced that customers will now scan their own staying passes, rather than passing them to an agent. Food should be placed in a clear plastic bag and put into a bin, to grind triggering alarms that require agent inspection. Up to 12 ounces of liquid sanitizer are now allowed in carry-on things too.

In the end, passengers may be their own worst enemies.

“The greatest security issues will be the potential for disruptive behavior as longer hang around times increase and decline in service offerings like food and drinks become the new norm,” said Timothy Williams, a evil chairman of Pinkerton, a security firm.

Janet Bednarek, story professor and author of “Airports, Cities, and the Jet Age: U.S. Airports Since 1945,” agrees.

“The biggest challenge will be getting U.S. fares to accept new measures like social distancing, wearing masks and temperature checks,” she said.

“People were enthusiastic to put up with the new security measures after 9/11 because airplanes very visibly had become terrorist weapons, and no one need to be on an airplane where that could happen again. Escaping a virus is less tangible,” she said. “And the messaging from the direction in this crisis has been far less consistent than after 9/11.”