The “preventable incident” endangered scores of lives both on the plane itself and others flying Max 9 aircraft, the suit alleges.

Three passengers are suing Boeing and Alaska Airlines for $1 billion in damages in the wake of a door panel blowing out midair on their flight.

The suit, announced Feb. 23, accuses Boeing and Alaska Airlines of negligence for allegedly having ignored warning signs that could have prevented the Jan. 5 incident, which forced the plane pilots to make an emergency landing.

“This experience jeopardized the lives of the 174 passengers and six crew members that were on board,” a release announcing the suit states. “For those reasons, the lawsuit seeks substantial punitive damages … for what was a preventable incident.”

  • @Donjuanme
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    -379 months ago

    Man, these are the people who define excessive litigation. I understand they are asking for way more than they want to actually receive. I think a million dollars per passenger would be excessive (but I’m not against an airline company be taught a lesson), a million dollars divided amongst all the passengers and crew, along with reimbursement for any travels delays etc would be more than I expect they’ll get, but asking for a billion to be split 3 ways is lunacy, and probably only there to get clicks on links now that I think about it. I’m just contributing to their goal…

    • @Cort
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      279 months ago

      A million dollars would only represent .01% of the 10 billion profit they made last year. That’s not even a slap on the wrist. If a preventable malfunction puts 100+ customers lives at risk, the penalty should be WAY higher.

      • @HappycamperNZ
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        39 months ago

        $1 billion - 10%.

        Yeah, should be higher looking at that content, but if you want to punish the airline the value shouldn’t go to the passengers.

    • @[email protected]
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      fedilink
      89 months ago

      I like the way you think. How much to kill the people you care about? Got any kids? How cheaply can industry kill them? We need a real low price, no haggling here.

      I appreciate that you understand their death should be a low cost business expense when designing things. Their mangled bodies can reduce overall price if we can factor in their cost fractionally over every unit. We can’t regulate away the unknown, so at least we can know your personal family minimum price to kill them in any horrible manner to budget correctly.

    • @Modern_medicine_isnt
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      89 months ago

      You forget, the lawyers get $999,999,997. So the passengers actually each get a dollar.

    • @[email protected]
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      fedilink
      8
      edit-2
      9 months ago

      Punitive damages are damages that are awarded in addition to contemporary damages. They are awarded as punishment for the defendant’s serious misconduct and as a means of deterring the defendant and others from such behavior.

      If a company cuts corners to land a billion dollar deal, if you punish them in the millions, it wont have much of an effect.

      • @Donjuanme
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        19 months ago

        If there’s a billion dollar deal how much is profit and how much is expenses?

        I’m not against fining Alaska a billion dollars, I am against 3 people being the ones to see the result of that fine. Much the same way I’m not against there being a billion dollar deal, I’m against the CEOs taking 80% of that deal as profit and the workers not seeing anything of it.

          • @Donjuanme
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            19 months ago

            I don’t think there are enough people in this to constitute a class?

            Classes are for when there’s an unknown amount of victims, and it’s up to the victims to determine if they fit the billing. This is the opposite, they know exactly how many victims there are, and who those victims were, it would be up to each victim to file a lawsuit, and other victims will have no access to joining into this lawsuit (unless the prosecution invites them on, maybe to as a way to get their testimony?)

    • @whotookkarl
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      49 months ago

      100-200 million is going to do nothing to dissuade Boeing from continuing to race to the bottom with their QC, there have been multiple recent years they bought back stock at 4, 5, 6 billion per year. It’s not just about restitution to the victims, it’s also about using fines to fix the systemic problems to keep it from happening again.