U.S. Airlines Struggle To Identify Passengers Exposed To Coronavirus

The U.S. is finally embracing social distancing, which Asia used to slow the spread of coronavirus. Yet another critical plank of Asia’s success story is proving difficult for U.S. aviation: contact tracing, in which an infected person helps officials identify everyone they had recently been in contact with and everywhere they had been.

Even before the surge in infections, lawmakers were dismayed at U.S. airlines being unable to contact their passengers quickly or at all. The seeming simplicity of having basic passenger details like a telephone number and e-mail address contrasts to aviation’s reality of antiquated technology and uncooperative travel agencies. This saw airlines falsely blamed as unwilling.

“We’re having a tug of war. The airlines don’t want to give up the information. They don’t want to cooperate,” Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) said during a House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee hearing earlier this month.

“The CDC is trying to get the information from the airline from the flight manifest,” Lynch said, “so they can tell the passenger that was sitting next to the person that tested positive, ‘Hey, you’ve been in direct contact with someone who has tested positive recently for coronavirus.’”

Tracing passengers is easier for authorities in China through integration of air tickets, national identity cards and mobile phones. Hong Kong publishes a list of flights and seat numbers that passengers had recently been on before testing positive for coronavirus. Singapore is offering its contact tracing technology for free.

Democrats proposed creating aviation contact tracing in the stimulus plan, but the proposal was not in the final bill.

Contact tracing challenges for airlines are multiple. First is passengers booking through a travel agency, including online companies. While travel agents collect passenger contact information, they seldom pass the details on to airlines. This has long been contentious for operational and commercial reasons. Airlines want to be in direct contact with passengers to advise of flight changes or offer pre-flight purchases like extra legroom seats or an upgrade.

“Think of someone booking through, say, Expedia. We don’t get the information from the customer through that transmission,” Spirit Airlines CCO Matt Klein told the House.

Klein, the only airline representative at the hearing, refuted Lynch’s claim that airlines did not want to disclose passenger details to the CDC. Klein said Spirit would provide passenger details if it has them. “We are collecting per the CDC requirements. We’ve been able to address that.”

But Spirit is an outlier owing to its newer IT system. Also, as a LCC, it likely receives fewer travel agency bookings and has more direct sales that come with passenger contact information.

The coronavirus outbreak is expected to see a change in the airline-agency relationship, at least for health matters, said Joe Leader, CEO of the Airline Passenger Experience Association.

“In instances where historically Expedia and other online travel agencies (OTA) have held back this information, I think you’re going to see a wall break down,” Leader told the House. “If the CDC requests it, I believe that the OTA behind the reservation will offer it to the airline, which historically they have not.”

These processes ignored the urgency of crisis, Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Oregon) said. “We have CDC trying to deal directly with airlines to try and get passenger information. There’s ongoing conflict over that,” DeFazio said. “CDC shouldn’t have to deal with individual airlines.”

Contact tracing can be slowed depending where airlines store contact information from all bookings, direct and agency. Passenger manifests, which list seat assignments, are typically generated from a separate system than the one holding reservation details. Reservation contact details are not typically passed onto the manifest, requiring layered searches.

Even for Spirit, “It’s inefficient and hard to get – not saying it’s not important to get,” Klein said. “We’ve been able to address that. Not every airline can.”

Also slowing efforts is that most airlines require only one set of contact details for all passengers in the itinerary. If the listed contact is not with the passenger possibly exposed to the coronavirus, more contact tracing needs to be performed.

“Information like e-mail address and cell phone number of each individual passenger is not something that’s stored on the [reservation] record,” Klein said.

Some international carriers, and foreign LCC alliances, require individual contact details for every passenger in a booking.

The Democrats’ proposed stimulus package tasked DOT to implement a national aviation preparedness plan, which the Government Accountability Office suggested in 2015 but agencies disagreed which should take the lead. Democrats wanted policies on contact tracing, screening, and quarantining to be developed by parties including airlines, airports, Customs and Border Patrol, and the CDC.

The contact tracing was stipulated to be for “inbound passengers,” implying international arrivals and not necessarily domestic passengers. But that and other proposals were dropped in the signed bill.

The GAO’s suggestion was in a 2015 report that found during the Ebola crisis if airlines referred a suspected passenger to the CDC for testing, the CDC did not always tell the airline if the passenger’s test resulted negative. That left airlines and their operation in an uncertain state for contacting passengers and crew and decontaminating an aircraft. (Positive results were always reported to airlines, GAO said.)

“It’s important information to have especially for that passenger and their family,” Lynch said of contact tracing. “They want to know that they’ve been in contact with somebody so they can take those precautions.”