Fly the Traumatic Skies

On the face of things, the story I saw this week on the website for one of the Seattle news stations looks like just another of airlines being foolish – and I’ve already spoken to you all of my determination not to let this degenerate into the Airlines Follies blog. But once I dug down past the headline, I came to realize that the story has a bit more to it than meets the eye- and it isn’t just the company that is racing to the bottom, because at least part of their concerns are at least partly reasonable…

You can pick up the original story from the King 5 News site if you want to, but the basic scenario is that a woman who has terminal cancer is trying to fly home from Seattle to Korea to spend her few remaining weeks with her family. She and her daughter obtained all of the medical clearances saying she was healthy enough to travel that the airline required, and signed off on all of the forms required to deal with the various legal issues, but the airline still refused to let her board at the last moment, saying that the other passengers would be traumatized if she were to pass away unexpectedly during the flight. Despite being presented with multiple expert opinions that this would not happen, the airline wouldn’t budge and also started making trouble about the refund (saying that processing the refund would take longer than the woman had to live), which prevented her from just taking the money and buying passage on another carrier…

Now, the business with the refund was heartless; it was also illegal, and after this was pointed out to them by the news program, the airline relented and coughed up the money. But while it would be fun to condemn the airline for the passenger trauma concerns in the first place, we can’t – which is to say, given the current state of the U.S. legal system, we can not say with any confidence that someone on that flight wouldn’t have taken the opportunity of having a fellow passenger expire during the trip to sue the airline for vast sums of money for emotional trauma or whatever cockamamie nonsense they (and their lawyers) could dream up. We can suggest that the company should have the courage of their convictions, that they should stand up for their passengers and against frivolous lawsuits, or that if they keep attempting to avoid anything that might conceivably traumatize anyone they will not be able to continue running their business for any length of time – but the fact is, that’s not our call to make…

As I occasionally note on my other blog, Notes on a Business Page , the management of any publicly held company isn’t paid to take on all of the injustice and evil in the world; they are paid to make money for the stockholders who actually own the company. It’s possible that the airline’s stockholders would have approved of taking a gamble to get this customer home, but short of an emergency stockholder’s meeting (for which there also wasn’t time) there is no way for the management team to know that, and if the stockholders have voted against accepting legal risk for such situations in the past, then the management team was just following the directives of the people who actually own the company. We can deplore those policies, and if you care enough about this issue you could purchase stock in the airline and protest at the next stockholder’s meeting, but short of that, we can’t really say that the management team has done anything wrong…

That honor must go to all of the people who have sued over such issues in recent years, and all of the ones who read this story and thought “Payday!” and their attorneys, of course. Because the truth is that those individuals aren’t just racing to the bottom; they’re jetting there at 525 knots on four jet engines…