I went to the University of Michigan Law School and Penn State for undergraduate. I practice American law both civil and criminal. I finally had to respond to the rubbish served up by the British Barrister from Trinadad.
Airline travel by its very nature is subject to delays, two cause of which are ATC and weather. Both parties to the contract for carriage contemplate delays and this issue is expressly dealt with in the contract. In essence, if it is the airlines fault there is compensation. If not, there is no compensation. Further, both parties contemplate and agree that if the passenger is delayed on the first leg of their flight, the second flight will take off as scheduled and compensation, if any, will be based on why the first flight is delayed. In part this is because the contract provides the passenger must be at the gate prior to the scheduled flight time, without regard to whose fault it is for not making it. These are scheduled flights, as compared with a charter flight (helicopter) which contemplates the flight will wait for the passenger.
One must remember also that the passenger has almost complete control over how much risk of delay they want to accept. They can buy a close connection, or they can fly the earliest segment one, so that they have hours at the connecting airport prior to the second flight. The extreme example would be to fly from State College to Philadelphia the evening before, so as to be ready for the final flight the next morning.
In Lisa v. Alitalia, 390 So.2d 455 (1968) the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed without opinion (per curium) the Second District decision at 370 F.2d 508 (2nd Cir 1966). Under Article 3(2) of the Warsaw Convention, there were limits on liability for death or personal injury unless a ticket was not provided to the passenger. The Second District held that a provided ticket without adquate notice of the limitation was the same as no ticket at all. The passenger did not have an opportunity to protect himself from the limit by buying more insurance or not taking the flight. (Note the Warsaw convention applied only to international flights, and the Court believed people use to flying only domestically, would not know or appreciate that there were limits on flights internationally.)
When the Russians shot down a Korean airliner in 1983, the issue came before the Supreme Court in Chan v. Korean Air Lines, 490 U.S. 122 (1989). The Supreme Court rejected the rationale of Alitalia v. Lisa, and held that an inadequate warning was not the equivalent of no ticket being issued, even though the tickets in question failed to comply with the Warsaw Convention as subsequently expressed in the Montreal Agreement, i.e. type size too small. Thus, the liability limits still applied.
Liability limits are normal in contracts, e.g. airlines don't cover electronics in checked baggage, garages aren't responsible for personal items left in cars. There is nothing improper about the agreement herein. If the passenger did not want to accept the contract with these limits, the family could have chartered a flight, driven, or taken the bus.
The family in this situation accepted the terms of the contract, and failed to prepare for delays which certainly are possible in air travel. There should be no compensation, nor is any needed. Americans for the most part are pretty self-sufficient and do not need any nanny-state airlines to feed us and tuck us into bed at night when travel plans don't go right.
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