I can’t remember when or what airport it was, but I’m sure I once saw a booth or table at a security station where you could package and ship small items which you didn’t want confiscated by TSA.
I’m guessing that the rolleyes was for offering the flight coupons for a flight that went horribly wrong. Like getting sick from a taco at a mexican place, and them then making it up to you by giving you another taco for free. YMMV
SN1P3
Companies are regularly held liable for the actions - deliberate and accidental - of their employees. This encourages the company to do things like screen their staff, make the flight attendants walk through a metal detector, train them on the dangers of their job.
I work in a building that contains a fab. We get toxic gas alarms. It really doesn’t matter if a bozo opens the container on purpose to cause damage, or if they do it accidentally - but because toxic gas can kill a bunch of employees very quickly, there are a ton of processes and training around being able to handle those chemicals. We do that because we are a good company and we don’t want people to die - but also because if they die we are responsible. Don’t underestimate the “but it costs money, lets not bother to train and screen people to control that small risk” for a company - they only have two reasons to train, ethics and liability - and not all companies are ethical.
Was it provided by the airport, airline, TSA or an inventive entrepreneur? 
I don’t understand this. An employer is responsible for all the actions of its employees while they are at work, even if they would be hard to predict or control. It’s just part of business: the customer pays the business for a good or service, and the business hires people to provide the good or service. The customer has no way of controlling those employees, but is paying the business (inter alia) to set up a management system which will get the employees to do the right things by the customers, and not to do the bad things.
So, if I buy food from a restaurant, and an employee has (negligently or malevolently) tampered with the food so that it makes me sick, why shouldn’t I sue the restaurant? For a start, I have no way of knowing what went on in the kitchen: the only evidence I have is the contaminated food. And secondly, the restaurant is selling me a package, and I’m paying for that package, which includes an implied promise that the food is fit for consumption.
“Mmm, yes, twenty years in prison does sound like an excellent life choice.”
$300 flight coupon is a horrible gesture. Better not to have offered anything beyond any compensation for missed connections, etc. If you’re going to make any offer as a gesture of goodwill for accidentally nearly killing your passengers, it has to have some significant value. $300 is just a slap in the face.
I don’t see how the airline owed anything to its passengers other than getting them to their destination within a reasonable period of time following the delay they experienced. The airline didn’t nearly kill them. A rogue employee did. The other employees seemed to follow every procedure in place to get the airline safely on the ground without injuring any passengers. Sounds to me like their training worked out pretty well. Why exactly is $300 a slap in the face?
Why the rolleyes? If I were the airline, I would be anticipating lawsuits being filed by passengers claiming that the airline was either vicariously liable for the actions of the employee, or that it should have known about the employee’s mental state and acted accordingly. Even without anticipating these, I think the airline should have either not offered anything, or offered something significantly more substantial than a $300 flight voucher, which in my view is more in line with adding insult to injury. Given the quote from the passenger it was offered to, he viewed it similarly.
What’s with the entitlement? Where’s the damages? Seems to me the airline made reasonable reparations for an unpredictable incident that their employees managed to keep under control. Did the plane crash? Were passengers injured? Where’s the damage? Sure they were scared, but that’s to be expected. There’s nothing not scary about a plane descending that fast and landing while a fire is dealt with on the plane.
I just really don’t understand why people are so anxious to blame the airline before any information about the guy’s background is even released. It seems like people are just jumping to conclusions and suffering deep pocket syndrome.
IANAL, but I believe to win a lawsuit, the defendant has to be negligent; i.e., a reasonable company would have done things differently from Fuckup Inc., and that would have prevented the problem, so they owe me. I’ll believe that this whole thing was caused by mind-controlling gremlins who hypnotized the flight attendant, before I believe that psychology is such an exact science that some HR flunky can mechanically administer a multiple-choice test to screen out every bad apple.
Oh, and I’m completely behind OtakuLoki on the mental illness debate.
[Violent anorexic] This fucking airline food has made me go off my diet for the last time. I’m blowing up the plane.[/violent anorexic] :rolleyes:
And if you had said that “from a legal perspective, the airline itself is at fault,” then, depending on it’s negligence in this situation, you might be right. But you made a blanket statement about how the customer perceives things. IME, I’m not alone in my unwillingness to fault the airline as a whole for this kind of situation.
And if the management somehow failed in training their employees, then I might be more likely to shake a finger at the airline as whole. In my book, the employer is not always responsible for the actions of its employees while they are at work.
I don’t blame the customers on the flight for getting frustrated at the airline, at first. No one knew why the fire started – could have been an electrical fire from poorly inspected components, could have been a stray meteorite. However, once the investigation starts pointing to the pissed off flight attendant, things change. It’s no longer proper, IMO, to blame the airline for the uncondoned actions of one of its employees. Nor would it be appropriate to sue the airline for something it really could not have prevented.
It would be akin to holding a parent responsible for a murder committed by their child. After all, the parents should be setting up a system to get the child to do the right things by society, and not to do the bad things, right?
In addition to the issue of negligence by the airline, there’s also the principle of vicarous liability, as posters such as Giles have mentioned. That is, an employer can be vicariously liable for the actions of its employees, even without negligence on the part of the employer. That principle would likely come into play here.
As for the issue of harm, many jurisdictions have torts of intentionally causing mental harm; some also have torts of negligently causing mental harm. If either of those torts are available here, and the steward is held liable under one of those torts, then the employer may also be liable vicariously for the acts of its employee. (I have no idea how the choice of law question would work out in this case, with an airline covered by federal law, flying from one state into another - which tort system has jurisdiction? Excellent exam question for conflicts of law…)
Lots of “ifs, ands and buts” in that short summary, and lots of different ways it could play out in court, but I wouldn’t rule out the airline being potentially found liable. I’m sure it’s got a lot of lawyers working on that very question as we speak.
Or indeed a flaming homosexual.
Just to add to one of the imponderables: Isn’t it considered that all aviation actions are under Federal oversight?
All things considered, I suspect that the airline may find it much cheaper to simply try to find an acceptable settlement with the passengers. Even trying and winning such a case would be expensive.
One more thought: given the examples we’ve seen recently with airlines having to close up shop because of lack of operating funds, I’m not sure that it’s in anyone’s best interests for the passengers to insist on a solely cash settlement. From what I recall reading when those three airlines failed recently, many airlines are cash-poor at the moment, and likely to find that situation getting worse. A lawsuit award that drops NWA below sustainability is not going to do much good for anyone.
I don’t doubt that there is a chance that a US jury might find some way to believe that the airline was somehow directly responsible. The common notion of what it means for one to be negligent when one is a deep pocketed company have become so removed from what it means between everyday people in everyday life as to make such responsibility sadly (IMHO) not unlikely.
However in Australia and the UK, vicarious liability of an employer for an employee’s acts only extends (broadly speaking) to acts actually or impliedly authorised. I think it would take an uncommonly charitable court to consider that setting a fire in the plane is impliedly within a flight attendant’s authorised duties.
US law may be different, and anyway I guess we’ve seen stranger tort cases won.
They probably gave them the $300 voucher and made them sign away their ability to sue the airline in exchange. Likely that won’t stop someone from suing, but it may slow things down a little.
Not me, that was my first post in this thread and I didn’t say anything about how customers perceive things. Just how the law (as I understand it - IANAL) and business ethics (which I do have some ability to speak to) treat corporate responsibility for an employees actions.
Sorry about that-- change “you” to “he.”
An airliner slid off the runway landing in a thunderstorm at Little Rock National several years ago, and the folks who took money from the airline sued them anyway.