On smaller flights, there may only be one gate agent and scanner. If someone's boarding pass isn't correct or there's some other issue, there gets to be a big backlog while they get sorted out. Sometimes that takes several minutes, and the smaller flights are often the ones with short 20-30 minute turnarounds scheduled.
Had this happen on a flight I took a few weeks back.
And that's still going to be the case with facial recognition.
The only time saved is scanning a ticket vs scanning a face. And people are pretty much guaranteed not to lose their faces.
Not if it's an automated gate.
I just got back from Australia, and the passport gates there are automated facial recognition; they look kinda like the gates in a subway where you scan a travel card.
A reject heads over to the desk to get sorted. Everyone else keeps going through the automated gate.
Lufthansa got on the PR train perhaps. Who knows? 20 doesn't sound a lot, but over many flights it starts to add up.
I think it is mostly about the international travelers just like the first sentence says:
> Some international travelers can leave their boarding passes and passports in their pockets when flying out of Dulles International Airport
They check the passports at the gate making sure you didn't swap boarding passes with someone else. For domestic travel it is usually just as you said - scan the bar code and move on.
This smells of a staged PR stunt. Or, maybe "boarded" means people were all through the gate, but not necessarily on the plane?
At best, it means they boarded an A380 through multiple doors in parallel instead of all through a single scanning location. This only matters for planes big enough to have multiple entrances.
The Japanese are still the most efficient at boarding though.