American Airlines to start collecting full name, gender and date of birth info from passengers

Want to fly on American Airlines? Starting Tuesday, Sept. 15, you will need to provide your full name as it appears on your driver’s license or other government ID, plus your gender and date of birth, to buy a ticket, the airline announced today.

The policy affects tickets bought through all means — by phone, online, at the ticket desk or through a travel agent — American spokesman Tim Wagner said. It won’t affect customers flying on tickets that were bought before Sept. 15, he added.

American’s action is part of the new Secure Flight program, in which the Transportation Security Administration is changing the way that  passengers’ names are checked against its so-called no-fly list of people who may pose a security risk.

Instead of providing the “watch list” to airlines, and having each airline interpret it and check passenger IDs against the list, the TSA is asking airlines to collect personal information when the ticket is purchased, and then the TSA checks that information against its list, TSA spokeswoman Sterling Payne said. The idea is to streamline the process and cut down on mistakes in identifying people who might be on the list, the TSA said.

Although Wagner said he believed that American may be the first major airline to implement this latest phase of Secure Flight, which adds date of birth and gender to the information collected, Payne said she couldn’t confirm that. She said that although the TSA is working with each airline to implement the program, “We are not providing what airlines are participating in the program or the schedule for when they will be participating.” She said the TSA was declining to provide that information “for security reasons.”

In a follow-up Q&A post, I’ll pass along some answers from the TSA and American about details of the program.

— Jane Engle, assistant Los Angles Times Travel editor

[Photo: Passenger at American Airlines check-in counter at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago in 2004. Credit: Tim Boyle/Getty Images]

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 14, 2009 at 3:47 pm by Jane Engle and is filed under Africa & Middle East. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.