Back in January, I flew American Airlines from London Gatwick to San Francisco. At the checkin counter, I was shocked when an AA security guard (not a customs officer — private, corporate contract-security for AA) demanded that I produce a written dossier of the names and addresses of the friends I planned on staying with in the USA. She cited an unspecified TSA regulation that required this, and could not tell me what AA’s document retention policy was, nor what would be done with this information. Her aggressive supervisor accused me of undermining the safety of airlines in the sky by refusing to answer, and affirmed that the TSA required it. I stood fast, and finally the terminal supervisor told me that since I fly American enough to hold a Platinum card, I wouldn’t be required to turn over this information.
I wrote an open letter to AA asking why they asked me for this info, and what TSA rule they were operating under when they did so.
Imagine my surprise when I got a reply from AA telling me that they’d been telling the press that my “specific behaviors” had triggered the secondary screening and that I had been told that they would give me the information they were taking on my friends’ names and addresses when I left the counter. The latter is a flat out lie — not a misunderstanding or a grey area of the truth, a total and utter fabrication. The former is intriguing — what behaviors “triggered the secondary screening?” Moreover, AA told me that this was a case of a screener who misunderstood the policy, but if that’s so, why did her supervisor back her up?
So I wrote a response, pointing out all of this and repeating my unanswered questions about the screening procedure.
On Friday, I got a terse reply from AA, telling me that a Federal Aviation Administration rule forbid them discussing the specifics of their procedures. That’s a weird answer, since nearly all of my questions had nothing to do with the specifics of their procedures, and since the FAA no longer oversees much in the way of airline security, having been deprecated in favor of the Transport Security Agency.
My latest letter points all of this out. The FAA may tell them not to tell me which behaviors trigger secondary screening (ah, security through obscurity, I feel safer already), but it surely doesn’t prevent them from explaining why they issued a press-release that lied about what happened at the counter, nor does it require them not to disclose their privacy policy, which they are required under British law to have and to produce on demand. And of course, it’s not a law if it’s not written down and subject to inspection, so they should certainly be able to tell me the number, name or reference for this regulation.
In your letter of the 22nd, you say, “Federal Aviation
Administration regulations prohibit us from discussing the
details of security measures so as to avoid compromising the
purpose and integrity of the process.”This came as a surprise to me: I was under the impression that
the FAA had basically ceded security administration to the TSA.
Indeed, it was the TSA which the AA representatives at Gatwick
cited when they asked me for a written dossier on my friends’
names and addresses.It’s good to hear that this is the FAA and not the TSA. However,
I have never heard of an FAA regulation that prohibits airlines
from sharing details of their security procedures with the
public.Which leads me to ask:
* What is the name, number or reference for this regulation,
please?
Update: Adam sez, ”
I follow-up to Cory’s letter to American Airlines with one of my own, and suggest that others do the same. The text is posted to make it easy for others to do the same.”
I have been an American Airlines customer for over 15 years. However, I am very concerned that you seem to have a different set of security regulations in place for AAdvantage Platinum members, and this raises a number of questions for me:
Update 2: Michael sez, “the United States refused to allow a flight destined for Mexico City to pass over U.S. airspace because two of the passengers were on the ‘no-fly’ terrorist watchlist. So the plane ended up turning back to Amsterdam – and 278 passengers ended up spending 11 hours in the air for nothing.”