Lawyers acting on behalf of American Airlines say a woman who was left permanently disfigured after she tripped off an airplane and ended up smashing her face into the jetbridge is to blame for her injuries because she failed to notice an ‘obvious’ hazard.
Diane Kozlowski suffered what she describes as “numerous cervical, lumbar and thoracic injuries,” as well as facial injuries, head injuries, bilateral eye injuries, and bilateral hand injuries that resulted in her permanent disfigured after she tumbled off an American Airlines airplane.
Kozlowski was a passenger on American Airlines flight AA447 from Phoenix to Chicago O’Hare on July 30, 2022, and after an otherwise routine flight, she went to exit the plane in Illinois only to end up seriously injuring herself as she stepped off the plane.
In a recently filed lawsuit, Kozlowski blames American Airlines for the accident because, she claims, the jetbridge hadn’t been properly aligned with the door of the aircraft.
As a result, the jetbridge was ‘significantly’ lower than she had expected, and her lawsuit alleges that this was a danger to passengers that American Airlines should have warned people about.
Despite the fact that so many areas of our lives are being transformed through automation and AI, positioning a jetbridge to the side of an aircraft is a manual task that requires specialist training.
Sometimes jetbridges are positioned to low, causing a potentially dangerous step down and this is a known issue. In fact, jetbridges are also known to sometimes have a life of their own, self-adjusting the height, sometimes with unintended consequences.
Many jetbridges even have monitoring devices that are placed underneath the open aircraft door to alert ground staff should the jetbridge start rising to such a degree that it could potentially damage the aircraft door.
In some cases, aircraft doors have even been ripped off after the jetbridge has malfunctioned and started uncontrollably rising.
In response to Kozlowski’s lawsuit, however, lawyers acting on behalf of American Airlines have not only denied that it was at fault for her injuries but have attempted to shift the blame onto Kozlowski.
In an ‘answer at complaint at law,’ American Airlines says Kozlowski was careless and negligent and failed to keep a proper lookout. The airline also claims Kozlowski should have taken more care “of an obvious hazard “when faced with an open and obvious condition.”
And while American Airlines maintains that it is at fault, lawyers says Kozlowski’s conduct is more than 50% responsible for the injuries she sustained and, therefore, she should be barred from getting any compensation off the airline.
American Airlines isn’t alone in blaming its passengers own passengers for injuries sustained on their airplanes, and last month, Delta Air Lines accused a passenger who claims to have been seriously injured by a fully-laden beverage cart of negligence that negates its responsibility.
Gail Hamilton of Pinellas, Florida, says she was left with a shoulder injury after a flight attendant accidentally pushed a beverage cart into her during a flight from Paris to New York JFK in June 2022.
Delta’s lawyers say that Hamilton’s injuries were caused solely by her “own culpable and negligent conduct” and that the airline and its flight attendants didn’t do anything wrong or behave negligently.
