Flight crew improperly treated medical emergency as security threat, deceased’s family alleges
Air carriers and their employees, who directly interact with passengers, have the ideal position for giving timely and useful threat information to Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents, the California Court of Appeal for the First District recently said.
In Ilczyszyn et al. v. Southwest Airlines Co., a Southwest Airlines passenger on a flight from Oakland to Orange County suffered a pulmonary embolism while locked inside the airplane’s lavatory. The flight crew saw him as a security threat instead of as a medical emergency. The plane landed, and his fellow passengers disembarked. Only then did he receive medical care, at which point he had gone into cardiac arrest. He later died in a hospital.
The plaintiffs, who were the passenger’s family members, brought a wrongful death lawsuit against Southwest Airlines Co. and the flight crew, including the pilots and flight attendants. They claimed that the flight crew knew that the deceased had a medical emergency, still treated him as a disruptive passenger, falsely reported him to law enforcement personnel, and thus delayed the medical treatment he needed.
Southwest, filing summary judgment motions, argued that its employees did not cause the passenger’s death and that they had the following protections under the law:
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