Scared Jet Fliers Can’t Sue, Justices Rule : Law: Supreme Court holds that passengers must suffer a bodily injury to recover damages from airlines. Case involved a plane that nearly crashed.
International air travelers who experience the trauma of a near accident may not sue the airline for emotional injuries, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday.
In a 9-0 decision, the justices said that a 1929 international agreement signed in Warsaw demands that passengers suffer a bodily injury, not just a psychic injury, if they are to recover damages.
The decision reverses a ruling that would have allowed terrified passengers aboard an Eastern Airlines flight to win damages because their plane nearly crashed into the ocean after taking off for Nassau in 1983.
In a second ruling examining the small print of passenger tickets, the court said that a cruise ship line may require injured persons to bring lawsuits in a jurisdiction selected by the company. The 7-2 ruling may force nearly 200 Southern Californians who were injured aboard a Carnival Cruise Lines ship in January, 1988, to pursue their legal claims in a Florida courtroom rather than in California.
In fine print, the cruise line tickets say that passengers agree that “all disputes . . . shall be litigated, if at all, in and before a court located in the state of Florida,” where Carnival is headquartered. The high court said that passengers are bound by that clause, even if it is inconvenient to them.
The airline case sounded like every flier’s nightmare. The engines cut off, the plane dropped in altitude and the passengers feared they were about to die.
On the morning of May 5, 1983, an Eastern jumbo jet lost power in all three engines shortly after taking off from Miami for a short trip to Nassau, the Bahamas. As the jet drifted down, the pilot told the passengers and crew to prepare for a crash landing.
But moments before the craft would have plunged into the Atlantic, the pilot got one engine revved up and the plane limped back to a safe landing at Miami International Airport. It was learned later that mechanics had failed to replace O-rings, causing a loss of oil pressure.
In a lawsuit against Eastern, the passengers said that this near crash amounted to more than a “white knuckle” flight. Several contended that they were traumatized by their brush with death.
The Warsaw Convention of 1929 set the rules for all airline travel that includes an international destination. As originally drafted in French, it says that passengers may sue the airline for a lesion corporelle . In English, this has been translated as a bodily injury. But lawyers for the passengers said that it is more correctly translated personal injury, which under French law can include emotional as well as physical damage.
Based on that rationale, a federal appeals court in Atlanta ruled that the passengers could win damages if they could prove that they had suffered emotional injuries.
But the Supreme Court ruled in the case (Eastern Airlines vs. Floyd, 89-1598) that the words have been used consistently to mean a bodily injury and that there is little evidence the countries of the world meant to include non-physical injuries.
The Carnival Cruise case concerned a Washington state woman who was injured on a cruise ship that had left from the port of Los Angeles. A federal appeals court said that she could bring a lawsuit in her home state, rather than in Florida.
But Wednesday, the high court reversed that decision (Carnival Cruise Lines vs. Shute, 89-1647). The ruling may affect a much larger case pending in a court in Long Beach. Some 244 persons filed suit against Carnival for injuries they suffered aboard the cruise ship Tropicale, which encountered a severe storm off Mexico after it left Los Angeles.
