Glitch in Heathrow Airport’s ePassport gates cause major delays
Travellers have been facing long queues with wait times of up to four hours in order to board their flights or are simply being forced to remain on aircraft. The gates use facial recognition technology to verify the traveller’s identity against the data stored in the chip in their biometric passport, as well as run the data against numerous databases to determine if the traveller is a security risk. The Home Office did not give details about why the gates had failed other than chalking it down to a “technical issue”. On 24 September, Heathrow’s ePassport gates also faced glitches that prevented them working for a period of several hours. In 2017, it was estimated that around 100 million passengers had used ePassport gates since they first went live in Manchester Airport in 2008. Initially…