The air traveler’s journey is not smooth, and Thales is working to remedy this. How ?
Yannick Assouad: For us, fluidity will come from digital and we are here to facilitate this transition, through our expertise, not only in digital but also in secure digital, this is an essential point. Firstly because there are regulations including the GDPR in Europe (i.e.: anonymized, fleeting personal data transmitted by the means chosen by the traveler). The paradox is that our systems respect these restrictions! The brake is therefore legal or regulatory, not technological. It is up to us industrialists to prove to the legislator the efficiency of the protections put in place, their inviolability, their evanescence, in order to evolve the regulations.
Where regulations are more flexible, what have you put in place?
This is particularly the case in Asia and the Middle East, where many airports are in the discussion phase with us, it is confidential. But we have already contracted with Changi (Singapore): it is installed and it works, on facial recognition, because there are no GDPR-type limitations. Today, it is impossible in Europe to have the data that allows you to be recognized “facially”, except for the police, not a technological player or an airport. We therefore need to invent other systems. This is the reason why we set up tokens that the person chooses and which are not necessarily their face but, for example, a boarding pass, necessarily fleeting, or even the photo of their dog, which we can be used either permanently or for a given trip.
At what point in your travel journey do you use it?
We use it during registration, that is to say, today, for the majority of cases, in our living room, online. It is at this moment that the token is chosen by the traveler and then it is used by the airport, via our “Flight to gate” system, to recognize it and allow an uninterrupted journey from home to boarding. But the system could be expanded.
How ?
This token could be extended to the entire journey, from your home-departure airport taxi to a car rental from your arrival airport to your final destination, and for everything to be digitized. That the activation of applications for each transport used is no longer necessary. This is also technically possible with a tamper-proof identifier, therefore respecting the regulations. Once again: regulations must trust the technology, it is up to us to convince.
The downside of the airport route remains the security passage. When will we be able to do without this “big unpacking”?
This already exists, with technology other than ours, in some American airports: you no longer have to take anything out of your luggage. But these systems are extremely heavy – they require major improvements such as structural reinforcements – and expensive. At Thales, we are trying to reduce them with a system called LX View which scans, therefore produces images, but also determines the atomic weight of the content to analyze the materials present.
In your opinion, how long will it take me to leave my Parisian home for my meeting in New York, without having to take my computer and the liquids contained in my luggage through security?
For security clearance, in 3 or 4 years maximum. For the single app and token all the way, in 5 or 6 years. Maximum.
2023-11-02 19:02:41
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