This particular case is a bit harder since it's not purely using public data, but may still qualify since it's likely scraping with legally-obtained credentials.
I know of businesses (scraping for ride-sharing, scraping for business intelligence for retailers, scraping from LinkedIn - see HiQ Labs v. LinkedIn) that have continuously succeeded via scraping in ways that large businesses oppose.
The key is: you must make enough profit to justify dedicating engineering and legal techniques to defend your scraping.
- Scraping public data is legal, as affirmed by the Supreme Court in Van Buren v. United States [1] and HiQ Labs v. LinkedIn [2]. Defending yourself or suing the data owner in court are both expensive though
- Defeating anti-scraping via technical means is pretty much always possible, but can be costly depending on the scraped site's technical expertise and value in keeping their data private. The benefit to you must exceed the cost to you, and ideally should also exceed the cost to the data owner
- Mobilizing PR and internal resistance may also be effective, but it's usually hard to have outcry from a large enough group to change an organization's policies. In this case, the union can push for it, but AA may try to withhold improvements until the next set of union negotiations