4/10/2020 Airlines Refused to Collect Passenger Data That Could Aid Coronavirus Fight - The New York Times

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Airlines Refused to Collect Passenger Data That Could Aid Coronavirus Fight
Public health officials have been pushing airlines for years to gather more traveler data, but airlines have balked, citing cost and time.

By Natalie Kitroeff and Jessica Silver-Greenberg

March 31, 2020

For 15 years, the U.S. government has been pressing airlines to prepare for a possible pandemic by collecting passengers’ contact
information so that public-health authorities could track down people exposed to a contagious virus.

The airlines have repeatedly refused, even this month as the coronavirus proliferated across the United States. Now the country is paying
a price.

As the coronavirus spread into the United States this year, the federal government was not able to get in touch with or monitor airline
passengers who might have been exposed to the disease or were carrying it into new communities.

Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Health and Human Services have spent years warning
airlines that they have complete contact information for only about half of their passengers, those who book flights directly through the
airlines as opposed to third-party ticketing websites like Travelocity. During the Ebola outbreak in 2014, for example, the scarcity of
contact information handicapped the C.D.C. as it tried to reach Americans who might have been exposed to the virus, according to three
government officials.

But airline executives and lobbyists have protested that it would be expensive and time-consuming for them to start collecting basic
information like email addresses and phone numbers for all passengers.

The lobbying has worked. Over the past 15 years, the industry has beaten back proposed rules and legislation that would have compelled
airlines to collect contact information before passengers board flights. Even last week, as Congress approved tens of billions of dollars in
aid to the industry, the airlines helped derail an attempt by the Trump administration to require them to start compiling such information.

While the government has access to flight manifests showing who is on board each flight, and where they sit, there is sufficient contact
information for only about half of the passengers on any given flight. If a passenger later tested positive for the coronavirus, government
officials said, they would struggle to get in touch with people who sat near that passenger to see if they, too, had been infected.

Current and former officials at the C.D.C. said in interviews that the lack of information compromised their ability to perform contact
tracing of airline passengers, a tactic that helped combat the coronavirus in countries like South Korea.

“Contact tracing is really hard. You have to find people, build their trust and keep in touch with them,” said Dr. Thomas Frieden, who ran
the C.D.C. during the Obama administration. “This is the bread and butter of public health, and every little bit you can do to give you a
lead helps.”

The industry’s battle against collecting more information for the government dates back to 2005, when health officials were assessing
their response to the SARS outbreak.

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At the time, officials at the C.D.C. made what they thought was a simple request of airlines: Hand over five pieces of identifying
information for each passenger, according to two federal officials with knowledge of the discussions. The C.D.C. wanted people’s names,
phone numbers, email addresses, the addresses where they would be staying in the United States and emergency contact information. All
the airlines needed to do, the government said, was ask a few more questions when passengers checked in for their flights.

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4/10/2020 Airlines Refused to Collect Passenger Data That Could Aid Coronavirus Fight - The New York Times

The airlines balked: They said it would take months, if not years, to retool their computer systems to accept such information and to
share it quickly with the government.

By the time of the Ebola outbreak in 2014, there still was no system in place. When the C.D.C. asked airlines for more information to help
find passengers who were sick or had potentially been exposed to Ebola, the airlines complained about “the burden and the privacy
concerns” of providing that data, Dr. Frieden said.

“They were vehement about it,” he said.

In 2016, the C.D.C. wanted to mandate by law that air carriers collect and share such information.

The industry again protested. Lobbyists from Airlines for America, a powerful trade association, noted that about half of all tickets were
booked through sites such as Expedia and Travelocity. Those companies, which compete against airlines for customers, are loath to share
passenger data with rival companies that might try to steal their business.

In an October 2016 letter to the C.D.C. and Health and Human Services, Douglas Lavin, an executive at the International Air Transport
Association, another airline trade group, wrote that the “C.D.C. has not adequately accounted for the industry burden and cost for
collecting these new data elements.” The letter was signed by five airline lobbying groups.

In conversations with federal officials, the lobbyists promised that if the proposed rule was changed, airlines would come up with a
voluntary solution within a year, according to a government official who participated in the discussions.

Ultimately, the proposed rule was watered down. The final version, enacted in 2017, required airlines to report passenger information only
“to the extent that such data are already available.”

The rule had almost no effect, because the airlines didn’t increase the amount of data they collected from passengers, according to four
people familiar with the matter.

Then, in January, the coronavirus arrived by plane in Seattle.

Seattle-Tacoma International Airport on Jan. 31. The first U.S. case of coronavirus was announced on Jan. 21. David Ryder for The New York Times

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In a series of tense conference calls that began in January, C.D.C. officials told Mr. Lavin and an Airlines for America lobbyist, Sharon
Pinkerton, that the agency was planning to issue an emergency rule that would compel the airlines to collect and share detailed
passenger data, according to five people who were on the calls. The C.D.C. argued that such resources were crucial for them to contain the
crisis.

Airline officials responded that it would be impossible for them to retool their computer systems, some of which were based on technology
developed in the 1970s, fast enough to aid the government’s fight against the coronavirus. They presented two alternatives: Airlines could
hand out paper forms for passengers to fill out and then the government could pay to have the data entered into databases. Or the airlines
could quickly develop an app that the government could use to require that travelers provide accurate information in order to enter the
United States.

“We have said we will do this, but it’s going to take 12 months,” Ms. Pinkerton, the airline lobbyist, said in an interview. “But we think
there are better ways to do this.”

The airlines found a sympathetic ear inside the Trump administration, including among senior officials at the Federal Aviation
Administration. On conference calls with other government officials, Dan Elwell, the deputy F.A.A. administrator, made the case that it
would be extremely difficult for airlines to redesign complex technical systems to gather the passenger information, according to two
people with knowledge of the calls. Before joining the F.A.A., Mr. Elwell worked for two years as an executive at Airlines for America.

On Feb. 12, the Health and Human Services Department issued a temporary rule requiring airlines to gather detailed passenger data. The
rule expires once the coronavirus pandemic ends.

But the airlines said it would take a year for them to change their computer and other systems to enable them to start collecting the
information, and in the meantime they are fighting to undo the rule. In a March 13 letter to the C.D.C. and the Health and Human Services
Department, lobbyists from Airlines for America and the International Air Transport Association said the airlines and travel agents would
have to spend $164 million to buy more airport check-in kiosks, installing new computers and hiring more gate agents, among other costs.

“The C.D.C. is using the Covid-19 outbreak to make airlines spend hundreds of millions of dollars to create new systems or modify old
systems,” the lobbying groups wrote in the letter, which was also signed by the Regional Airline Association and the National Air Carrier
Association.

Ms. Pinkerton said on Tuesday that the Airlines for America lobbying group was close to finishing an app that the C.D.C. could use to
solicit more detailed contact information from passengers.

Government health officials said they didn’t think an app was a viable long-term solution because in-flight internet is often unreliable and
not all passengers have smartphones, according to interviews. And the paper-based system would be too cumbersome to help the
government quickly trace people who might have been exposed to the virus.

As Congress rushed to pass a huge stimulus bill last week, the government’s top health officials tried again to permanently solve their
contact-tracing problems. In discussions days before the bill was pushed through, they asked Republican Senate staff members to include
language that would require airlines to digitally collect traveler data in exchange for receiving the largest government bailout in history.

The C.D.C. was rebuffed. Senate aides were concerned about the privacy implications of such a requirement and didn’t want to impose
extra burdens on an already distressed industry.

They also knew that two key senators — Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, and Kyrsten Sinema, Democrat of Arizona — had questioned the
idea. At a hearing in March, Ms. Sinema presented a letter written by the Airlines for America lobbying group, which suggested using
paper forms or an app. In March, the two senators wrote a letter to Vice President Mike Pence saying that they favored a government-
run app.

Ms. Sinema — who along with Mr. Cruz sits on the Senate Commerce Committee, which oversees the airline industry — received more
money from the Airlines for America lobbying group than any other member of Congress in 2018, according to the Center for Responsive
Politics. Mr. Cruz was among the top recipients of money from Delta and American Airlines that same year.

Ms. Sinema said in a statement that she had “worked across the aisle for weeks to convince the federal government to adopt an app
quickly to make contact tracing at all ports of entry a reality.”

Lauren Aronson, a spokeswoman for Mr. Cruz, said in a statement that “while Senator Cruz understands the importance of contact
tracing, thrusting an unfunded mandate that requires all the carriers to rework their entire I.T. systems, at a time when the carriers are
hurting badly, was not appropriate or effective.”

On Friday, President Trump signed a bailout bill that awarded the airline industry more than $60 billion in taxpayer funds. It did not
require airlines to collect new information about passengers.
David Gelles contributed reporting.

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4/10/2020 Airlines Refused to Collect Passenger Data That Could Aid Coronavirus Fight - The New York Times
Jessica Silver-Greenberg is an investigative reporter on the business desk. She was previously a finance reporter at the Wall Street Journal. @jbsgreenberg • Facebook

A version of this article appears in print on April 1, 2020, Section B, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Airlines Balk At Collecting Data to Help Track Virus

The Coronavirus Outbreak

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