Passengers of Air Asia India flights, boarding from Bengaluru’s international airport, can now choose to authenticate their identity via facial recognition systems installed at the airport as part of the Indian government’s DigiYatra scheme. The airport, in a statement on August 3, said that passengers can choose to either board an Air Asia flight by going through the biometric authentication process, or through the existing manual process. We've reached out to the airport with more questions. Air Asia is the second airline at the airport to start this facility, following Vistara, which has allowed this facility since July 2019. The Indian government had launched the DigiYatra scheme in 2018, which allows automatic processing of passengers’ identity based on a facial recognition system at check points like: entry to airport, security check and aircraft boarding. How the flow works: Here’s how the face authentication is supposed to work, on paper. A passenger Registers for DigiYatra using one of 11 registration kiosks at the airport Proceeds to departure entry e-Gates, scan your boarding pass at a kiosk and match their face At security check, validates their credentials by allowing a camera to scan their face Scans their face yet again for validation and boards the flight. How the data is handled: The airport claimed that passengers’ biometric data is used only for “authentication and verification” of passengers to assist the boarding process and “not for recognition”. The passenger data is deleted within a “few hours” of flight completion, it added. Passengers’ biometric…
