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Passenger Manifest Required For All Air Carriers Nowby Jose Latour
This may not be big news to most of you guys, but since I have a considerable number of fellow pilot readers, I wanted to share this with you: as of January 1, federal law requires the electronic filing of passenger manifests for all airlines and shipping lines, as well as for all passengers entering or departing the United States. As larger commercial airlines and cruise ships are already required to provide such passenger manifests, the new regulation is going to affect mostly charter companies and smaller airlines and shippers, who are likely to be burdened in that they don't necessarily have the software and human resources to provide this information. According to the Miami Herald article reported by the ever intrepid Alfonso Chardy (who, of late, is a wonderful resource for me as far as his articles), the INS is being rather cool about the whole thing and has told carriers that those having problems meeting the reporting requirement will indeed be given more time to comply. According to the statistics in the article, in fiscal year 2000 (October 1, 1999 - September 30, 2000), 33.7 million nonimmigrant foreign nationals were admitted into the United States. Florida was the state with the highest number of total foreign visitors. A Washington-based INS spokeswoman stated: "This new requirement was mandated by Congress to enhance border security." The requirement is in addition to the foreign registration involving nationals of 20 countries (already covered extensively in other usvisanews.com sections) and in conjunction with the tracking system associated with the presence of foreign students in the U.S. I spoke to a couple of folks who will be impacted by the new rule, both of whom asked to remain anonymous given our local INS readership. One, a part-owner of a charter company flying regular flights to the Bahamas and the Florida Keys out of a South Florida airport, indicated that the procedure is going to be "a pain in the neck." He told me that currently, one of the flight crew's responsibilities is to maintain the flight manifest, but that the additional reporting requirements add another bureaucratic step to an already huge paperwork burden established by the FAA, Customs, and other associated agencies. His impression was exactly the same as mine: more paperwork, none of which will do a thing to deter terrorist activity in the United States. The other person that I spoke to is a Canadian H-1B pilot who is not a client of mine but whom I have befriended through e-mail. I wanted to hear his thoughts because he has been flying both commercial and charter, and I figured he would know the difference between the paperwork associated with each situation and how this will impact his respective past and present employers. His thoughts were that for the larger companies, it shouldn't be that big of a deal: most of them keep databases on the booking of larger group flights with the bulk of passenger information anyway, and the charter companies for which he had flown were mostly domestic as far as destinations. He indicated that companies flying internationally were already having to gather passport information, and it should be something as simple as modifying a database to suit whatever specific data the new requirement elicits from the charter companies. On the other hand, he indicated that for small companies flying short hops to the Bahamas (like the first guy), it will be a royal pain in the neck. Once again, we see the pattern repeated: more legal requirements, more bureaucracy, more work for Americans... and are we any safer?
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