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.

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?

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.

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.

Airline Victim – Is Litigation a Real Possibility?