Scalpel: “I’m sure a lawsuit will be brought against American Airlines in this case, but the sad truth is that if you have a cardiac arrest when you’re 30,000 feet over the ocean, then you are likely going to die whether the oxygen tanks are working or not.”
Panda: “No doubt the family of the lady are going to sue the airline. And they’ll probably win because in our death-averse society, there is no place under Heaven were we expect to be at the mercy of nature, not as long as there is someone around with a uniform and deep pockets. Someone has to pay? Don’t they? John Ritter taught us that. Even a major aortic dissection, a killer so fearsome that even when discovered there is often nothing to be done but hope the sucker doesn’t dissect over something vital before the patient can be rushed into the operating room for a highly dangerous, do-or-die, vascular procedure that is usually too late anyways, even a major act of nature like that has got to be blamed on someone.”
Related posts:
- John Ritter and the $67 million malpractice trial
- Code blue
- Tufts Medical Center versus Blue Cross Blue Shield, who blinked?
- Tufts Medical Center plays the Partners HealthCare card and drops Blue Cross Blue Shield
- No health blogs for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts
- John Ritter defendants: "They just lost less"
- Midwives don’t carry malpractice insurance
{ 5 comments }
Perhaps they will sue. But then again, you might be surprised…
Airline Victim – Is Litigation a Real Possibility?
Every sociopath shyster in NY City is lined up at the door, begging to get this case. It is easy money.
American Airlines should not be liable. But this is NY City, USA: home to the most corrupt judges, the sleezient attorneys, the greediest plaintiffs, and the stupidest juries on earth.
If the airline does not have a duty to have oxygen on board for medical emergencies, then it shouldn’t be liable for having tanks that were empty.
I don’t know enough about the legal history of medical events on airlines to know the answer to that question–and bet hardly anyone else opining does either.
But doesn’t it bother you just a little bit that they had empty tanks on board. What good is an empty tank? What were they there for? Ballast? It was American Airlines not Mexican Airlines. Doesn’t anyone do their job anymore? Someone somewhere was, or should have been, made responsible for making sure the tanks had Oxygen or they should have been removed. Our country is drowning in incompetency, bureaucracy, and laziness.
My mistake. Apparently they are required to have the tanks.
So they have the tanks and they are empty. If this a factor in her death, or even in her suffering before an unavoidable death, how can they not be liable?
>>”So they have the tanks and they are empty. If this a factor in her death, or even in her suffering before an unavoidable death, how can they not be liable?”
Civilian passenger aircraft aren’t required to have medically-trained personnel on board. No airline is. A passenger jet isn’t a flying emergency clinic or air ambulance, it is a common carrier, like a train. At best, some attendants might have CPR training, but even then, that is for people in arrest; there isn’t a protocol for giving oxygen or for sorting out what is exactly wrong. If there is a Banyan kit, there still isn’t always going to be someone qualified to use that kit.
You are implying that an airline has a duty to provide emergency medical supplies aboard aircraft, even if there is no one qualified to use those supplies. And that in the event someone dies for lack of some drug–and concentrated oxygen is a drug in this instance–the airline is somehow responsible for that death.
I have to tell you that makes absolutely no sense.
I hope the case is thrown out not on some Warsaw Convention technicality, but for reasons that a tort claim lacks merit on its face: no duty to provide drugs or medical treatments in flight.
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