“Via verde” fast track at Faro airport |
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The system is known as RAPID (automatic recognition of passengers identified by document) and was presented at Faro airport on Thursday morning at a gathering of journalists and tour operators from the United Kingdom, where there are already some five million people who hold electronic passports.
According to the secretary of state for Internal Administration Jaime Magalhães, the system, which will be tested at Faro airport between 21st May and 21st June, aims to simplify the procedure for people to cross borders without ceasing to guarantee very high standards of quality and security.
According to the minister, this is the first system in the world which enables travellers with electronic passports to be checked automatically, cutting out the need for human intervention.
The machines that are being installed in Faro firstly check that passports are genuine and validate the data contained on the chip. Then the photo of the bearer of the passport is compared with the bearer in person using a camera which carries out facial recognition and measures the passenger’s height, and automatically opens the gate if the information matches.
SEF officers will only go into action if the data do not match. The procedure allows the completion, collection and processing of arrival and departure forms to be eliminated, which are currently required from nationals of countries outside the Schengen area.
Jaime Magalhães said that the process takes less than twenty seconds, and can be as fast as five seconds per person, and the rejection rate is less than 1%.
For the president of the Portuguese Tourism Institute (ITP) Luís Patrão, this is an important step towards making the country “more accessible and secure”.
The test phase for the system will be monitored by specialists and researchers at the University of the Algarve, who will check the reliability of the ten machines at Faro airport.
The government predicts that RAPID will go into full service at the beginning of the Portuguese presidency of the EU on 1st July. Faro and Lisbon are the priority airports in the first phase, during which the investment is estimated to be 4 million euros.
The system was conceived by the SEF and it is being developed by the company Vision-Box. In Portugal, electronic passports with the new chip began to be issued on 29th August 2006, but they will be used side by side with the old passports in the next few years, until these expire.
source: algarve observer |
