MPH1980

This rumour pervades.

As you're exiting - go watch the people who are monitoring the gates - they are the ones at the back wall that you walk past.

8 or 9 times out of 10 as I walk past they are sitting back arms folded.

So unless they have a foot pedal to control approvals - or there are people somewhere else doing the approvals - the system is automated.

Takiteasy

That's because the photo comparison work is actually done manually as someone pointed out upthread. You can see the chaps doing the comparison at their booths when you walk past them at the end of the e-gates area. One chap/lass can process about 6 lanes concurrently which is why it still is much faster than going to the manual booths.

It would actually be fun to test the system by having 2 persons in a couple swapping passports at the machine and see if that gets noticed. Worst case, trip to the e-gates booth and apologies for passport swap.

FrancisA

Sorry to disabuse you of the belief that a Teresa May-led Home Office IT project might actuallly work - there is no facial recognition software in operation.

The system works like this.

You put your passport in the reader and stare at the screen. If by virtue of your previous travels, you are on the trusted traveller list, this flashes up on the UKBF officer's screen (they are the guys you see in booths as you exit). Otherwise they look at the live image of you and your passport photo and assess whether you are the same person.

This is far from automatic and certainly not intervention-free self-service.

There are also obvious loopholes in the security of this system, but I am not going to point them out.

Suffice to say, I expect many reading this believe the e-passport gates actually work because in the U.K. we enjoy a press and political scrutiny system which does not hold politicalians to account for total and utter failures.

antichef

Grateful for small mercies at your age? 😉

jms_uk

Apparently, during the testing phase, this is the exact scenario [common for husband and wife to use other's passport] that would result in an error quite a bit [ie. open the gate].

T8191

Glad someone finally noticed

Blueberrypie

why they only use four out of fifteen egates at Heathrow? Always a long quE and mist egates aren't on. Also these egates refuse passports more frequently that others why?

T8191

I could guess [and only guess] that they have insufficient Border staff to do the monitoring [see above discussions about human intervention]. I could guess that one operative can only manage a finite number of e-Gates ... ISTR seeing him having about 6 displays on his screen in his little booth.

Calchas

Even us young'uns would be grateful of such a cast iron guarantee

EuropeanPete

Interested by the comments here. I have a new 2017 passport after my last one ran out of pages and like some of you here it just doesn't seem to work on e-gates. I think I've tried 5-6 times and it hasn't worked once.

A few years ago I would go right through on IRIS, then I had a working e-passport and now it takes ages to get through. Luckily I'm not in the UK so much anymore really. Travelling in the US with Precheck and Global Entry is so much more civilized.

ft101

Agree about the passport gates, but when shopping I much prefer to let someone else scan my stuff and put it in bags, and it helps keep them in a job. As pointed out already, authorisation for age or any other requirements is also immediate. I dislike shopping but I'm never in such a hurry to get out that I wouldn't rather let someone else do the work.

"Unknown item in the bagging area". No thanks.

hsmall

have the HAL employees any authority to force you to use the e-gates? I got grief when returning from Lagos the other week with a colleague who apparently shares a name with a wanted person and regularly gets failed by the e-gates. We just ducked under the tensa barriers and got shouted at. We ignored the yelling but I wonder if he had any actual authority to make us use one particular method of entering our country?

Calchas

No, they are not border force, just queue minders. Generally I keep my earphones in and pretend I cannot hear them.

Silver Fox

Is there some secret algorithm they apply to how many e-passport gates are open? Is it dependent on the types of flights arriving? Purple blazers on duty? Heathrow T2 is a variable as to how many are open it seems to me. They can't all be OOO or can they? If they are it is a high percentage.

Gagravarr

LGW South this morning (~8am) they only had 4 working e-gates, all the others were red x out-of-use. Heathrow on a bad day normally seems to manage more than that!