Airlines Begin Collecting Passenger Data For Secure Flight

Airlines and travel agencies this week began collecting domestic passengers' full names as on government-issued IDs, dates of birth and gender at the time of reservation as part of the U.S. Transportation Security Administration's passenger prescreening program, Secure Flight.

Paul Leyh, the program's director and former US Airways executive, told EuroBTN in early August "that not all channels can be done exactly on Aug. 15, and because it's phased in, some carriers may be asking for this information earlier and some a little bit later." However, he said the program is on track to shift air passenger watchlist-matching responsibilities to the government for all domestic flights by the end of March 2010.

"The first part is the collection of the data and the second is the transmission, which actually does the watchlist-matching part of it," Leyh said. "For all airlines, the expectation is that by Aug. 15, they'll be asking for this data and be able to store this data, but they're going to be transmitting that data to Secure Flight at different times, based on their implementation schedule. Carrier A may be cutting over in September, carrier B in October and carrier C in November."

Once all domestic carriers are transmitting data by the end of the first quarter of 2010, TSA said it would shift its sights to international airlines, for which TSA's sister agency, Customs and Border Protection, currently performs watchlist matching. "It's safe to say the international watchlist-matching process will be converted over to Secure Flight by the end of 2010," Leyh said. One primary goal of the program is to reduce the number of falsely flagged passengers. Though Leyh would not disclose the percentage of passengers wrongly identified on a government watchlist, he said Secure Flight would bring the number of correct matches beyond 99.9 percent.