May 24, 2024
The Honorable Pete Buttigieg
Secretary
United States Department of Transportation
1200 New Jersey Avenue, SE
Washington, DC 20590
RE: Docket No. DOT-OST-2018-0068
Dear Secretary Buttigieg:
The National Federation of the Blind, the transformative membership and advocacy organization of blind Americans, appreciates the opportunity to comment on the Department of Transportation’s submission to renew the rule concerning Traveling by Air with Service Animals. In that vein, the National Federation of the Blind renews and restates its strong opposition to the Department of Transportation’s (the “Department”) renewal of the Service Animal Behavior and Health Attestation Form and the Service Animal Relief Attestation Form. We continue to believe these forms are burdensome and unnecessary for passengers with disabilities who need to fly with service animals. All passengers are required to understand the law and their obligations. For passengers with disabilities, that includes keeping their dog under control and ensuring that there will be no relief incidents while on significantly long flights of eight hours or more. Yet, the Department continues to impose additional obligations on disabled passengers to, in essence, affirm that knowledge. These forms are discriminatory towards passengers using service animals, implying they are uniquely unaware of their legal obligations to always keep their service animals under control. The Department has not addressed these issues in its modifications of its forms.
The forms also continue to go beyond the scope of the Paperwork Reduction Act’s allowance for the collection of information “by or for an agency,” because, by the Department of Transportation’s own admission in its applications for Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Control Numbers, the forms “would be submitted directly to the airlines from passengers and not the Department.” The Department would only “review these forms if airlines assert that passengers have fraudulently completed the forms to determine if the matter should be referred to the Department’s Office of Inspector General [or] if it receives complaints from passengers alleging airlines’ documentation requirements for travel with a service animal was not consistent with these forms.” According to a conversation with Department representatives in May 2023, as well as subsequent conversations, no such assertion has ever been made by any airline. The collection of the information on these forms thus continues to have no practical utility and continues to be unnecessary for the proper performance of the functions of the Department. The burden of these forms on passengers with disabilities remains unwarranted and inconsistent with the law.
While the National Federation of the Blind maintains that these forms are an unwarranted and unlawful burden on guide dog users, we would still support an airline-funded, Department-managed Known Traveler Number program for passengers with service animals similar to the TSA Pre-Check program. Such a program should allow passengers with service animals to register for, obtain, and renew a Known Traveler Number at no cost to them, and allow airlines to confirm the number’s validity. Through this program, passengers could attest to the same information included in the forms one time without having to re-attest for each flight. Passengers should be able to enter that number either in their frequent-traveler airline program profile or provide it when booking flights. Such a number could be renewed upon renewal of vaccinations (typically every three years).
The Department should also implement a dedicated accessibility phone number to provide accommodations for passengers who require such assistance applying for and renewing a service-animal known traveler number due to their disability. Irrespective of whether the Department implements a known-traveler program for service animal users, it should still implement such a phone service to provide those passengers with assistance in completing and submitting the health and behavior and relief forms. The Department’s note in the form’s instructions that “[a]n airline must provide assistance in completing the form to individuals with a disability … as part of the airline’s general obligation to modify its policies, practices, and facilities when needed to provide nondiscriminatory service to individuals with a disability under 14 CFR 382.13” does not provide sufficient guidance to airlines regarding the time, place, and manner in which they must provide assistance to ensure non-discrimination on the basis of disability.
Should the Department continue with forms, they should not be expanded. Rather than increase the burden of the health and behavior form to include additional fields regarding training, the form should be reduced to have only a checkbox to be checked if the passenger requires the use of a service animal due to a disability, and a text field for what task the service animal is trained to perform. All of the other information is superfluous and can be summarized without identifying information. The passenger can attest and agree to all of that summarized information, including the animal’s health and vaccination status, with their signature.
If the health and behavior form is renewed without the changes we suggest, we continue to suggest that it must contain a non-mandatory release of privacy claims to allow a recipient of the form to verify the information with the persons identified on the form. The information on the form is highly sensitive, as it identifies a passenger as having a disability and, in many cases, what disability that person has. That information is health information requiring protection against disclosure to third parties without express authorization by the passenger. In addition, the form must clearly state that an airline’s failure to verify the truth – as distinct from verifying the untruth – of the information on the forms does not permit the airline to deny travel to a passenger with their service animal.
We also continue to suggest that the form include language to the effect that it shall be considered completed on the date submitted, so long as that is prior to the vaccine-expiration date entered on the form, irrespective of the date it is signed. This would further reduce the burden of the forms on passengers with service animals because they could store a current electronic or physical copy of the form, instead of having to fill out the form for each and every flight with exactly the same information save for the date of signature, but would still be consistent with the requirement of 14 C.F.R. § 382.75(a) that forms be "completed on or after the date the passenger purchased his or her airline ticket.” This small change to the form would thus define “completed” such that saved forms could be re-used without a new rulemaking. If other information on the form needs updating before vaccine expiration, the form’s truthfulness requirement would still require passengers to update that information before signing/submitting/presenting the updated form.
Finally, the Department continues to severely underestimate the burden of the proposed information collection. It does not take into consideration any accommodations that may be required for an individual with a disability to find, download, and complete the form. As any person with a service animal is, by definition, an individual with a disability, The Department’s failure to take such accommodations into account is inexcusable. Individuals with disabilities are routinely granted time accommodations of between fifty and one-hundred percent extra time to complete standardized and other tests roughly comparable to the tasks the Department includes in its estimate, but no such extra time is built into the Department's calculation of the burden. Beyond underestimating the time to complete those tasks, the Department does not include the time needed to determine how to submit the information to a particular airline in advance, nor does it include the time needed to actually submit the forms by whatever process each airline requires. The time estimate also does not include the time spent checking whether an airline received the forms and approved the passenger’s travel with their service animal. In addition, the estimated dollar burden does not include the stress felt by passengers with disabilities resulting from the fear that their travel with their service animal will be denied, either in advance or at the airport by airline staff, due to any issues arising from the use of the forms. The Department bears sole responsibility for taking these issues into consideration to establish a reliable burden value of its proposed forms. If the Department is unable to calculate a value that is reliable, it should discontinue use of the forms until it performs the necessary research and analysis to do so, taking the issues raised by commenters into consideration.
We appreciate the Department once again allowing comments regarding this topic. We hope you will take our concerns into account and eliminate the health and behavior and relief attestation forms, and consider substituting a Pre-Check-like Known Traveler program for service animal users. Should the Department continue to allow airlines to use those forms, we hope you will make the modifications we recommend to lessen the burden on passengers with service animals, and to conform with all legal requirements and obligations to protect the rights of passengers with disabilities.
Sincerely,
Mark A. Riccobono, President
National Federation of the Blind