Air Canada has introduced a pilot program featuring four biometric facial-verification e-gates at Toronto Pearson International Airport. The pilot includes one gate dedicated to domestic travelers and three gates serving passengers heading to the United States through the airport’s transborder zone.
Domestic passengers enrolled via Air Canada’s mobile app before approaching the biometric gate. At the gate, a camera captures their live facial image, matching it against the approved traveler record stored in Air Canada’s identity gallery. Successful verification bypasses the need to present a passport and boarding pass for final document checks.
For those traveling to the United States,
biometric enrollment happens automatically during preclearance border formalities at Pearson, where the traveler’s image is captured. The three transborder gates then verify live facial images against existing records without requiring separate advance registration.
Dormakaba provides the biometric gates themselves, while middleware connecting these gates to identity management systems is supplied by Airsphere and SITA. Air Canada contributes the domestic enrollment software and maintains the airline’s identity gallery used in the verification process.
Participation in the pilot remains optional, and conventional document verification continues to be offered at the airport. Toronto Pearson is monitoring pilot adoption rates, processing times, passenger throughput,
and customer satisfaction as part of the evaluation.
This biometric gate pilot builds upon Air Canada’s earlier trials involving mobile-based traveler identity linked to facial recognition at the airport. Elsewhere in Canada, Calgary Airport operates a separate biometric boarding process using selfie onboarding technology.
Toronto Pearson currently processes approximately 47 million passengers annually and anticipates passenger traffic growth to 65 million by the early 2030s. The airport is integrating digital identity and automated passenger processing as part of a broader modernization strategy to manage rising volumes efficiently.
