Before Flying, Read Ticket’s Fine Print

Have you ever read the fine print on your airline ticket? If not, you’d better get out a magnifying glass and start reading, especially if you are traveling overseas.

You may be surprised by what you read, assuming you can decipher the legalese. What you will find is a limitation on an airline’s liability in the event of a passenger’s injury or death in an “accident” on board the aircraft. The limitation--a maximum recovery of $75,000--only applies to international travel to or from the United States. It is part of the Warsaw Convention, a multilateral treaty governing air travel.

Earlier this year, all nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court read the fine print and had to decide whether it was big enough to be enforceable.

The families of victims who died in the Korean airliner shot down by Soviet planes in September, 1983, sued Korean Air Lines Ltd. for wrongful death. The families contended that the liability limit should not apply because the warning printed on the ticket was too small.

Liability Raised

When the treaty was first signed in 1929, the liability limit was about $8,300, but it was raised in 1969 to $75,000 by the Montreal Agreement, an accord among airlines. The Montreal Agreement also required that a warning about the limitation of damages be printed on the ticket in 10-point type. The Korean Air Lines tickets had 8-point type.

This was not the first time the Supreme Court had to interpret the fine print in this treaty. In a 1968 decision, the court had ruled that a notice printed in 4-point type was “camouflaged in Lilliputian print,” was “virtually invisible” and amounted to not providing the passenger a ticket at all. The treaty provides that the limitation on damages is eliminated, allowing an open-ended recovery, when a passenger is not given a ticket.

But in the case decided in April, the court ruled that even though the 8-point type was technically defective, it did not amount to a failure to deliver a ticket, and the $75,000 limit held fast.

The Warsaw Convention sets a “strict liability” standard. That means a passenger who is injured does not have to prove that the airline was negligent, only that the injury arose from an “accident “ on board the aircraft.

However, the airline still has a defense if the passenger was also at fault. The treaty was meant, among other things, to eliminate the complex legal wrangling that might be necessary to prove the airline’s negligence and thus give all injured passengers the right to collect damages, although collect less than they might otherwise recover.

But, as you might expect, there’s been some wrangling anyway, about the meaning of the word accident. The Supreme Court provided the final word on that definition in a 1985 case against Air France. Valerie Saks, traveling from Los Angeles to Paris, suffered great pain and pressure in her ear during the plane’s descent. She was diagnosed as having lost all her hearing in one ear, even though the plane’s pressurization system apparently worked.

The court said the Warsaw Convention and its strict liability standard did not apply. By defining accident as “an unexpected or unusual event or happening that is external to the passenger,” the court ruled that strict liability should not be imposed where the injury “results from the passenger’s own internal reaction to the usual, normal and expected operation of the aircraft.”

The Warsaw Convention also sets tough limits on an airline’s liability for carrying goods or baggage overseas. In addition, airlines set limits on their liability for carrying domestic baggage as well.

These limits are described in your tickets. So if you have some valuable luggage, it’s worth your time to read the fine print. Better yet, read the booklet “Fly-Rights: A Guide to Air Travel in the U.S.,” published by the Department of Transportation. Write to R. Woods, Consumer Information Center-K, P.O. Box 100, Pueblo, Colo. 81002.