ON OCTOBER 15th Delta Air Lines launched what it called America’s first “biometric terminal”, in Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. Once the programme is fully implemented, passengers will be able to use facial-recognition technology to check in, pass through security and board flights without having to scan a passport or boarding documents. The technology started to be used at boarding gates on October 15th and will be expanded throughout the airport’s international terminal by December 1st.

Travellers can still use the old system—fishing out their passports or boarding passes at every step of the process—if they prefer. But from an efficiency standpoint, the biometric system is enticing. Delta estimates that travellers opting to use facial recognition will save up to nine minutes per flight. As long as they enter their passport information during online check-in, they simply have to approach the camera at the checkpoints or boarding gates, which will then match their faces to the passport database and allow them to proceed. The system will be open to travellers flying abroad from Atlanta on Delta or its partner airlines Aeromexico, Air France-KLM, and Virgin Atlantic—a total of 1.9m people annually.

Still, there are widespread concerns about the technology. Privacy campaigners are worried about what the government will do with millions of flyers’ facial information. They also say that the government has not explained how long it will keep the data or how it will be used. And at Washington, DC’s Dulles International Airport, which recently adopted facial scans for arriving international passengers, there is some evidence that it has slowed journeys through immigration for many flyers.

However, the technology has shown some success in detecting passport fraud. In one 40-day period, facial scans at Dulles caught three impostors whose passports claimed false identities: two Ghanaians using American passports and a Congolese man using a French passport. In an age of heightened aviation security, it is therefore no wonder that Delta sees the new biometric terminal as the start of a worldwide trend. “We’re scaling first in Atlanta at Concourse F, and as we get experience with that we’re going to look to scale it throughout our system ultimately,” Gil West, Delta’s chief operating officer, recently told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a newspaper. “We think it will over time become the norm in the travel experience.”