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Passengers travelling through Kolkata and three other airports – Varanasi, Pune and Vizag – were unable to avail of the paperless check-in and boarding facility using facial recognition technology through the DigiYatra app for 11 hours on Sunday. The seamless digital information of flyers that is exchanged between DigiYatra foundation and the airline that carries the largest number of passengers collapsed early in the day.
The system was partially restored around 4.30 pm when information from the IndiGo cloud began to flow to DigiYatra. Incidentally, IndiGo had encountered a pan-India system snag on Saturday evening that had forced the ground staff to go manual and led to flight delays of 30 minutes to an hour.
This is the first major snag in the system since the facility was introduced in April. During the trials, officials had encountered a network issue that was sorted. The cause of the breakdown in real-time cloud data exchange will be known in a day or two.
The programme will initially start with only one dedicated entry route for passengers choosing the DigiYatra option, but will later be expanded, a spokesperson of the airport said. The programme allows domestic passengers to utilise the Biometric Boarding System (Face Pods), which eliminate manual verification and use facial biometrics for a seamless check-in, security and boarding processes.
The breakdown in DigiYatra led to lengthy queues at the airport entry gate and security check, particularly during the morning rush hour. Passengers also complained that despite downloading the boarding pass on the DigiYatra app before arriving at the airport, the security persons at the gate demanded that boarding passes be furnished as the DigiYatra app does not display the flight time.”Flight time and other data are digitally exchanged between the airline cloud and DigiYatra. Since the flow of information between IndiGo and DigiYatra had snapped, CISF personnel at the gate could not access and validate the information,” an airport official said.
Though other airlines on board the DigiYatra system, like Vistara, Air India and SpiceJet, had no such problem, their passengers were also denied use of the app that saves hassle and time as passengers can avoid queues.
An airport official reasoned that since 80% passengers travelling through Kolkata airport fly IndiGo, it did not make sense to operate the system as four out of five passengers were encountering “Invalid PR” alert while attempting to use the DigiYatra channels. On Sundays, around this time of the year, around 20,000 passengers fly out of Kolkata. Of them, more than 16,000 passengers fly IndiGo.
Following the glitch, gates 3A and 3B at the departure level – that had earlier been assigned only to DigiYatra passengers – were opened for all. It was the same with gates 1A and 1B.
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