Good morning. Can facial recognition – and public shaming – really speed up holiday travel? More on that below, along with Notre Dame Cathedral’s colossal renovation and Canada’s $50-million in Palestinian aid. But first:
Today’s headlines
- Canada promised helicopters and more border security in a bid to get Trump to walk back tariff plan
- The search of a Manitoba landfill identifies the most likely location of the remains of murdered First Nations women
- Despite billions in aid from Canada and others, South Sudan’s promised future remains out of reach
Welcome to a record-breaking travel season.Santiago Mejia/The Associated Press
Holiday travel
Faster, smarter, weirder
It is, somehow, December already. Your holiday cards may be trapped in Canada Post purgatory, but Mariah Carey is at this very moment blaring from a shopping mall speaker, there’s a giant blow-up Rudolph teetering precariously on your neighbour’s yard, and chances are good you’ve got a flight to catch in the next few weeks. Brace yourself: Airports saw record travel over the summer and this past U.S. Thanksgiving weekend. The Christmas season is shaping up to be another unprecedented rush.
Of course, that rush really means standing in a snarled queue behind other stressed-out passengers, waiting (and waiting) to pass through security, buy an overpriced sandwich and – especially – get on the actual plane. With fewer flights leaving the gate on schedule and taxi times creeping up, airlines are under increasing pressure to smooth the boarding process. Let’s take a look at a couple of their latest approaches: There’s the carrot, the stick and the astrophysicist’s method that I’m pretty sure you’re not going to like.
The carrot
As of tomorrow, passengers boarding most domestic Air Canada flights at Vancouver International Airport can walk onto the plane without handing over a single piece of physical ID. No need to fuss with your passport or driver’s license or even boarding pass – you go to a camera-equipped kiosk and offer up your face.
Air Canada is the first Canadian airline to deploy facial recognition technology. To use it, you’ll need to download the airline’s app, scan your passport and take a selfie to create what Air Canada is calling a digital “faceprint” (which they promise to delete within 36 hours of the flight). The app will hit you with Aeroplan incentives and ads for vacation packages, but unlike the U.S. airlines offering facial recognition – including Delta and United – Air Canada doesn’t require you to enrol in a loyalty program first.
Facial recognition technology in the Baltimore/Washington international airport.Julia Nikhinson/The Associated Press
As for the time saved? After testing facial recognition in some of America’s busiest airports, such as Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta and LAX, Delta says its technology shaves a 20- to 25-second security encounter down to seven to 10 seconds – though I suspect not everyone is so speedy right out of the biometric gate.
The stick
There’s a term airline insiders use to describe habitual zone hoppers trying to board a plane before their turn: They’re known as “gate lice,” and as if that phrase wasn’t sufficiently mortifying, American Airlines has now added public shaming to the mix. If you roll up to scan a boarding pass ahead of your group, the new system issues an audible two-tone alert to the gate agent (and the many folks behind you) and you’ll be sent back into the crowd to wait. The immediate effect will be to cause more delays, but the airline hopes once beeped, twice shy – a deterrent I feel would be stronger if the alert sounded less like a text notification and more like an air horn.
The astrophysicist’s approach
To be fair, boarding zones are a mysterious mechanism, built not out of seat location but some frustrating mix of ticket price, cabin class, frequent flyer status and whether you happened to use an airline credit card. Surely it’d just be more efficient to board from the back of the plane to the front? Back in 2008, an astrophysicist named Jason Steffen ran a bunch of computer simulations to show this method of boarding caused the fewest bottlenecks. To his surprise, however, the simulated passengers still got tied up in the aisles trying to store their overhead luggage. In fact, back-to-front boarding took the exact same time as the truly bananas front-to-back approach.
But his simulations did find a clear and counterintuitive winner – call it outside-in boarding. Under this model, passengers load the plane from the window seats, starting with even-numbered rows and moving to odd ones, so people can space out within the cabin and avoid traffic jams. The airline moves to even-numbered middle seats, then odd ones, before wrapping up with even- and odd-numbered aisles. Steffen’s outside-in approach proved 30 percent faster than random boarding. It’s also twice as fast at boarding back to front.
And no one wants to use it, because this method doesn’t care about parents with young children or honeymooning couples or the guy who bought his premium-economy aisle seat with the right credit card. Last year, United Airlines dipped a toe into the window/middle/aisle model, which they nicknamed WILMA – but only after first-class travellers, business-class travellers, travellers with disabilities, unaccompanied minors, active-duty military and families with small children have all boarded the plane.
Maybe it’s too exhausting trying to game the boarding process. I might be coming around to the spartan simplicity of WestJet’s new UltraBasic fare. No frills. No carry-on. No surprises: just a seat, boarded last, at the very back of the plane.
The Shot
‘I have lived with the volcano since I was a child.’
Ash still covers houses on La Palma, one of the Canary Islands.Anna Liminowicz/The Globe and Mail
Three years ago, a six-metre-high wall of molten rock poured from the Tajogaite volcano and buried the homes on western La Palma, one of the Canary Islands. Now, residents are returning to rent diggers and stay in pup tents while they build again. Read more about their efforts here.
The Week
What we’re following
Today: The UN convenes a conference in Cairo on the humanitarian response in Gaza, with Canada pledging $50-million in aid for Palestinians in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
Tomorrow: Canada’s six biggest banks begin reporting their earnings, and analysts expect one final slump before falling interest rates spur demand – and mortgage wars – next year.
Friday: Survivors call for a complete assault weapon ban in Canada as they mark the 35th anniversary of the Ecole Polytechnique massacre.
Friday: Taylor Swift kicks off the first of her three shows in Vancouver, but ticketless fans won’t be able to Taylgate.
Saturday: Five years after a devastating fire, Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris throws open its doors to the public again.