Singapore Changi Airport’s 10-second border points aviation’s AI future

For most Singapore residents, clearing immigration at the city-state’s renowned Changi Airport takes just 10 seconds without a single flip of a passport. Facial and iris cameras confirm who they are, the gate slides open, and they are through.

It is exactly that kind of fuss-free travel experience that airports around the world are now looking to replicate at a time when the travel industry is faced with growing air traffic.

According to air transport technology provider Sita, the airline industry is expected to carry eight billion passengers a year within 20 to 25 years, rising towards 10 billion by 2050, which is roughly double of today's traffic.

But airports cannot easily double in size, and there won’t be twice as many aircraft or immigration officers. “How do we move twice as many travellers without doubling our infrastructure?” said Sita chief executive David Lavorel.

In its Impact Report 2025, Sita noted that the answer lies in building next-generation technology capabilities, including AI, for which 97% of airlines and 82% of airports would have invested in by the end of 2026.

Examples of how AI is used across the industry run the gamut. In the air, Sita’s fuel-optimisation software uses machine learning and digital twins to suggest more efficient climb profiles to pilots. In 2025, the software processed 2.9 million flights for 59 airlines, saving 127,732 tonnes of fuel and the equivalent of 403,633 tonnes of carbon dioxide.

On the ground, Sita is targeting one of travel’s most familiar frustrations – mishandled luggage. Through a partnership with Apple, now extended to Google, passengers can share the live location of an AirTag-equipped bag with their airline, reducing the number of lost bags by 90%. Separately, AI-driven routing automatically rebooks delayed bags onto the next available flight – a process that, at Thai Airways, was cut from three minutes to one second.

Inside airport terminals, AI is being used to wring more capacity out of existing buildings. Sita’s Total Airport Management tools, trialled at Toronto Pearson Airport and the subject of a new agreement with Abu Dhabi Airports, use AI to optimise how aircraft stands and gates are allocated. Industry benchmarks cited in the report suggest such systems can cut delays by around 15% and taxi time by 5-8%.

In Aruba, part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Sita noted that pre-cleared passengers using a digital travel credential and biometric checks now clear arrivals in as little as eight seconds, 78% faster than before. Globally, the company now supports risk assessment for over 271 million travellers a year, most completed in under four seconds.

The same platforms are being pitched as a hedge against disruption. When last year’s CrowdStrike outage took down airline systems worldwide, more than 460 flights were kept running on Sita’s Maestro departure control system.

In a proof of concept project at France’s Reims control centre, air navigation provider DSNA gave controllers the same weather and traffic information already used by pilots and dispatchers. This helped to cut weather-related delays by about 60% and avoided around 100,000 delay minutes over two months.

In 2025, Sita’s revenue rose 7% to $1.71bn, a fourth straight year of 7-8% growth, backed by $93m of research and development spending and the acquisition of airport interior design specialist CCM. In Singapore, the firm has also digitalised cruise and ferry processing at the Singapore Cruise Centre.

Looking ahead, Sita’s innovation arm, Sita Labs, which worked with more than 30 airline and airport customers in 2025, is developing a universal data stream for real-time, multi-party data exchange, as well as agentic AI capabilities to orchestrate airport and airline workflows.