Last Sunday over 120 passengers remained stranded at Milan Linate airport. They missed their EasyJet flight to Manchester. How come? Due to the kilometric queues that have been generated by the adoption of the EES system (Entry/Exit System), with which the European Union replaced the traditional passport stamp with a computerized system based on biometric data, such as fingerprints and facial recognition. The control system, in force since 12 October 2025, entered its implementation phase from 10 April 2026 and is not applied to airport checks of European citizens, but only those coming from non-EU countries (therefore also to those coming from the United Kingdom).
At Linate, on 12 April, all passengers heading to Manchester found themselves facing this procedure for the first time: a step that takes several minutes per person and which, multiplied by hundreds of individuals, generated the “bottleneck” that caused 78% of passengers heading to Manchester to miss their flight. The result was a progressive accumulation of queues, delays in boarding and, finally, the departure of the plane with dozens of travelers still stuck at the controls. What happened was not due to a system malfunction, but to a critical issue that sometimes occurs in the initial implementation of such complex systems.
The EES digital passport control system
To understand what really happened at Linate, however, it is necessary to go into detail about the functioning of the Entry/Exit System, the digital infrastructure that is replacing the traditional control based on the stamp.
The EES is an automated IT system designed to record every crossing of external borders by third-country nationals, i.e. all travelers without citizenship of a European Union state or associated countries such as Iceland, Norway, Liechtenstein and Switzerland. The system is in fact active in all 29 countries belonging to the Schengen area. It applies to short stays, up to 90 days within 180 days, calculated over the entire area in question.
From an operational point of view, the system completely replaces the logic of the physical stamp with centralized digital registration. Every entry, exit or refusal of access is saved in a common database accessible to border authorities: the border crossing is no longer an isolated event, but part of a traveller’s digital history.
At the time of crossing, the system collects different types of data: the personal information of the travel document (name, date of birth), the data relating to the movement (place and time of entry or exit) and, above all, biometric data, such as the image of the face and fingerprints. The latter are not stored as simple images, but transformed into “biometric templates”, i.e. mathematical representations used for rapid and reliable automatic comparisons.
The procedure varies slightly depending on the type of traveler. Those who need a visa to enter the Schengen area already have their fingerprints registered in the European Visa System (VIS), so the EES will only retain the facial image. Those traveling without a visa, however, must provide both their face and four fingerprints. In both cases, the goal is to build a digital identity that is verifiable at each subsequent step.
One of the central functions of the EES is the automatic control of stay times: the system calculates the length of stay and reports so-called overstayersi.e. travelers who exceed the permitted length of stay, eliminating the dependence on manual and fragmented checks.
On a technological level, many airports are equipping themselves with self-service digital kiosks that allow passengers to register part of their data in advance. After this phase, the traveler still presents himself to an operator, but with the process already partially completed, reducing the time of human control.
The theoretical advantages are obvious: faster checks (at least on paper), greater traceability of movements and increased security. The system allows you to identify false identities, monitor migratory flows and support investigations into serious crimes or possible acts of terrorism, thanks to access to structured and shared data.
Because the passengers on the EasyJet Milan-Manchester flight were stranded
The transition, however, is not immediate. The EES was introduced gradually and only reached full operation in April 2026. During this phase, some border crossings also temporarily continued to apply traditional procedures, creating a hybrid situation. The case of Linate falls precisely into this scenario: a system designed to increase efficiency in the long term, but which in the initial phase requires more time for each individual passenger.
Registration upon first entry generally takes between 3 and 5 minutes per passenger. Under normal conditions this may seem like a negligible time, but when applied to hundreds of passengers it can lead to a significant increase in control times. At Linate, the passengers on the flight we told you about at the beginning were all considered “first entries”: no one could benefit from rapid procedures. This resulted in a progressive accumulation aggravated by a limited number of biometric stations and non-optimized queue management.
The testimonies collected by various British media, including the Mirror and the BBCspeak of waits (in various airports) of up to two or three hours at peak times, with physical discomfort also linked to the heat. Some passengers missed their flights and were forced to find alternative solutions, incurring high costs.
