Settlements to the families of 346 people who died in the two catastrophic Boeing Max plane crashes will be calculated, in part, by how long the victims knew they were doomed.
Lawyers handling claims against the US aerospace company said the longer the passengers and crew were aware of their desperate fate, the larger the likely payout.
“There’s a better chance of (financial) recovery if it took minutes rather than seconds for the plane to crash,’’ Joe Power, a personal-injury lawyer representing some Ethiopian victims, told Bloomberg this weekend.
Sure, there’s a difference between straight financial damages – how much would they have earned for their families if they hadn’t died, to make those families financially whole – and pain and suffering ones. But I thought that it was the Warsaw Convention which determined airplane accident damages? Which have strict limits on payouts, especially for pain and suffering?
Or has the American tort bar found ways around that? Or, indeed, am I just wrong?