Consumers Bumped From Flights Can Sue

Airlines can be sued for damages for selling tickets that are subject to bumping when flights are overbooked, a federal court ruled.

William D. West, a patent lawyer from Helena, Mont., planned a trip to Virginia on a Northwest Airlines flight in 1986 but was told the flight was overbooked. He put the trip off for two weeks and went to court with a lawsuit seeking punitive damages.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday that a federal ban on direct state regulation of airlines does not prevent a passenger from suing under ordinary state law for harm caused by airline practices. A U.S. District judge had previously dismissed the lawsuit, saying federal law barred it.

“Selling nonrefundable tickets limits a traveler’s ability to make changes but not the airline’s ability . . . to switch to a smaller-size aircraft, increasing the chances of bumping,” said Cornish Hitchcock of the Public Citizen Litigation Group, a Ralph Nader organization that helped represent West.

West had been scheduled to arrive in Virginia at 9 p.m. and turned down an alternative flight that would have landed at 3 a.m. the next day.

The airline was studying the ruling and had no comment, said its lawyer, Jon Metropoulos.

The right to sue for overbooking was established in a 1976 Supreme Court decision, a case that started when Allegheny Airlines bumped Nader from a Washington-to-Hartford, Conn., flight.

The 1978 federal airline deregulation law, which prohibited state laws “relating to rates, routes or services of any air carrier,” bars only those state laws that purport to regulate airlines, said Appeals Court Judge Dorothy Nelson in the 3-0 ruling.

Many airlines offer free-trip coupons to passengers on overbooked flights. Federal law also entitles a bumped passenger to a refund of the ticket price, up to $200, if a substitute flight is more than an hour later than the original flight, or twice those amounts if more than two hours late.