Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said Tuesday (Feb. 9) that making all domestic air passengers pass COVID-19 tests before flying would be “a horrible idea,” CNN reported.
The President Joe Biden administration has floated the idea of instituting such a requirement. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told CNN in an interview also broadcast Tuesday: “The [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is] looking at all its options, but there’s got to be common sense medicine, science driving this.”
The possibility of such a rule has drawn a chorus of criticism from airline industry executives, with Bastian challenging the idea in especially strong language.
“I think it would be a horrible idea for a lot of reasons,” he said during part of an extended interview with the network.
The main reason to oppose the proposal, Bastian said, is “it would also take probably about 10 percent of the testing resources that this country needs to test sick people away from those people. It’s hard to get tests. There’s days of delays still. I think it would be a logistical nightmare.”
Also, airlines are safe, he told CNN, explaining, “Incidents of spread aboard any of our planes is absolutely minimal. In fact, very, very few document cases globally, not just domestically.”
Finally, the industry is just beginning to bounce back from protracted pandemic-related closures, he said to CNN, and the proposed rule “would set not just the transportation and travel industry back, but the whole hospitality sectors, the hotels — it would set us back at least probably another year in the recovery.”
“It will not keep domestic flyers safe,” he added during the interview. “If anything, it’s going to keep people away from what they need to do … people need to start reclaiming those lives. Taking testing resources away from those truly in need, I think, would be a terrible decision.”
On Monday (Feb. 8), Reuters published excerpts from a letter the news service said was sent by two senior Boeing executives to federal officials complaining about the possibility of a new test-before-you-fly requirement.
“Imposing such a burden on the already financially beleaguered airline industry has the potential for severe unintended consequences that will ripple across the entire economy,” Boeing Commercial Airplanes CEO Stan Deal and Chief Aerospace Safety Officer Michael Delaney wrote, per Reuters.
According to Reuters, Boeing and CDC officials would not comment on the letter, which also stated: “If this broader travel journey is, in fact, the main concern of the CDC, then science would dictate all aspects of travel should receive similar scrutiny including hotels, car rental agencies, mass transit and restaurants.”
Federal data backs up assertions that airlines are starting to bounce back.
As the pandemic spread rapidly last spring, passenger trips through Transportation and Security Administration security checkpoints fell below 100,000 per day nationwide compared with more than 2 million trips through the same checkpoints on analogous days the prior year.
Travel has slowly increased year over year from that 4 percent low recorded in April. While the year-over-year figures aren’t as strong now as they were around the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, the latest available day’s numbers — those for Monday — had 864,783 travelers boarding plans, or about 40 percent of the 2020 figure for the comparable date.
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