The best place to install biometric-based exit systems for foreign nationals departing the U.S. through airports to assure these individuals actually board the plane is at the jet way, a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) official tells a Senate panel.

“So if we put it in the jetway we’ve got the assurance that you got onboard the plane and the plane took off,” John Wagner, deputy Assistant Commissioner for CBP’s Office of Field Operations, says of the a biometric exit system. Putting such a system at an aviation security checkpoint or elsewhere in a terminal doesn’t prevent a foreign national from turning around and exiting the airport after they’ve submitted to the biometric check, he tells the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.  

“And then we’re defaulting back to the same system we have in place today when the airline’s transmit the manifest to us,” Wagner said. “With the close out record we’re defaulting to that biographic assurance that the person actually boarded the aircraft and left or they didn’t switch boarding passes, which we’ve seen them do on inbound from time to time as well too.”

Wagner says that whatever way or ways CBP ultimately deploys biometric exit systems at the nation’s airports, costs will be part of the equation and there will be concerns about disrupting the travel process.

“We don’t want to be in a position where we spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, have a tremendous impact on the travel process, and then we have a system that’s so easily defeated,” he said. “It’s the placement of the technology, more or less in the jetway of the aircraft, and now you’re talking thousands of jetways across the United States.”

Unlike many foreign airports where there are controlled departure areas, that’s rare in the U.S.

“On departure, you go though the TSA (Transportation Security Administration) checkpoint and you can depart from any number of gates, mixing with arriving passengers, leaving passengers, domestic passengers, so that’s where the challenge is,” Wagner said.

And airports don’t want to give up the flexibility they currently have changing gate assignments for departing international flights, says Chris Browne, the airport manager at Washington Dulles International Airport who testified on behalf of the American Association of Airport Executives.

“I think from the airport operations perspective, the gate assignment is as much premised on the size of the aircraft, the size of the hold room,” Browne says. “And what we don’t want to have is an outcome that would restrict us from what gates we could put what aircraft. So on departure we’re agnostic to its destination, which means we can flex based on changing conditions and we would not want to lose the ability to do so.”

Browne says “AAAE and the aviation industry broadly support” the biometric testing that DHS S&T is doing but also don’t want the effort to be “arbitrarily expedited.”  He says “The testing must accurately assess all of the enabling costs normally borne by airport operators, including the often high costs of integrating new technologies into legacy facilities” such as Wi-Fi.

There is another year of testing that needs to occur before an informed decision can be made, Browne says.

Arun Vemery, S&T’s program manager for the AEER project says that the costs for upgrading infrastructure at airports is part of the equation, including information technology, “to ensure these things [biometric transactions] occur within the seconds that are required, otherwise we are going to have new additional lines in other parts of the airport where there have been no lines so far.”

Browne also says that solutions need to be “truly scalable.” For example, he says that in a particular afternoon two Airbus A380 jumbo jets will depart from Dulles with about 500 passengers each, “but if I’ve got to add 10 seconds to each person going through that boarding bridge to retrieve a biometric data…whatever it is, I can conceivable add an hour to the departure process so these are the operational issues that we’re really interested in fully understanding that are hopefully going to get vetted through this testing process and then the question remains, ‘Okay, is it scalable to the kind of system that we have?’”

In an interview with HSR in early April, Vemery said that in the testing that S&T has been doing at a facility in Maryland, self-service technologies that incorporate biometrics as part of the exit process shows promise although one challenge here is the usability and intuitive nature of the technologies. However, he said every airport is different from the next and even terminals within an airport can be different from one another so it won’t be a one-size-fits-all solution.

In addition to the testing and forthcoming pilot being managed by S&T, CBP is doing several tests of biometric-enabled processes and technologies as part of its Entry/Exit Transformation strategy. One is a facial recognition test at Dulles as part of the entry process for U.S. citizens coming into the country, another involves the use of handheld devices at Atlanta Hartsfield Jackson International Airport for biometric exit checks, and a third will involve the collection of biometric and biographic data of inbound and outbound non-exempt, non-U.S. citizens at a land port in San Diego.