American Airlines Pilots Union Joins Fight Against Google's $10 Million Purchase of Spirit Airlines Data

Spirit Airlines shut down and liquidated earlier in 2026. As part of that bankruptcy process, Google placed the winning bid of $10 million for the airline's old internal data, which the company said it plans to use to improve its products and train AI models, according to Business Insider.

That sale is now facing a growing wall of labor opposition.

The Allied Pilots Association, which represents American Airlines pilots, filed an objection to the sale in bankruptcy court this week. More than 700 of its current members previously worked at Spirit, the union said, meaning their old employment and training files could be sitting inside the data Google is buying.

The union's filing argues the sale "threatens to have a chilling effect across all commercial airlines," not just Spirit. Its core argument: pilots and crew members participate in voluntary safety and training programs built entirely on the expectation that what they disclose stays confidential. If that information can later be sold to a tech company, even years after the fact, the union says the whole system of voluntary safety reporting could break down.

"To permit that information to later be sold to a third-party without ensuring complete deidentification and satisfactory confidentiality protections will serve to threaten the voluntary safety and training programs that provide the backbone of the commercial aviation industry in the United States," the APA's filing said, as quoted by Business Insider.

The APA is asking the court to block the sale until those confidentiality concerns are resolved.

Not the First Objection

The APA isn't the first union to push back. The Air Line Pilots Association, which represented Spirit's own pilots before the shutdown, and the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, which represented Spirit's flight attendants, had already filed objections before the APA joined this week, according to both Business Insider and Hyper.ai.

Google has said the deal covers Spirit's internal data and custom software, not customer records or credit card information, and that any data it receives will be scrubbed of identifying details before use. Spirit declined to comment on the litigation. Google did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.

Congress Is Getting Involved

Separately from the court fight, a group of labor-aligned House members is organizing around the sale. The Transportation Trades Department, AFL-CIO, is circulating a sign-on letter led by House Labor Caucus Co-Chair Rep. Steven Horsford (D-NV), asking other members of Congress to add their names by Wednesday, October 7, 2026.

The letter itself, addressed to Google and Spirit executives identified in the TTD document only as "Mr. Pichai and Mr. Davis," lays out specifics the earlier court filings didn't: it says the proposed sale involves roughly 100 million emails and 500 million Microsoft Teams messages, along with employee timecard records, payroll data, disciplinary records and medical accommodation files.

TTD President Greg Regan's cover note to House offices argues that federal privacy protections for employee data are "much weaker than those for consumer data," especially when that data changes hands inside a bankruptcy sale. The letter is endorsed by ALPA, AFA-CWA, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, and the Transport Workers Union of America.

The Case for the Sale

Google's defenders would point out that bankruptcy asset sales routinely include a company's internal data and software as part of the liquidation estate, overseen by a court, and that Google has publicly committed to stripping personally identifying information before using any of it. Nothing in the available record suggests Google intends to publish raw employee files or sell them onward to a third party.

The unions' counter is narrower but pointed: aviation safety reporting works because pilots believe what they disclose in training and incident reports will never resurface outside the safety system. Even a scrubbed dataset built from 500 million internal messages carries some re-identification risk, especially for a workforce as searchable as airline pilots with public certifications and flight histories. Whether "deidentification" can be verified to the unions' satisfaction, rather than just asserted by Google, is the actual dispute working its way through bankruptcy court.

No bankruptcy judge has yet ruled on the objections from APA, ALPA or AFA-CWA. The House sign-on letter remains open through October 7, with the letter itself dated to go out the following day. Whether enough lawmakers join, and whether a judge delays or modifies the sale terms, will determine if Google's $10 million purchase closes as originally bid.