Greensboro Personal Injury Lawyer - Mass Transit (Airline, Cruise Ship, Train, Bus)

Distracted Driving Takes to the Skies: Pilots Flew Past Airport While On Their Laptops

Lawrence Egerton — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:51:49 GMT

The two Northwest Airlines pilots who flew more than 150 miles past their destination on Wednesday have admitted that rather than being asleep, which was speculated, they were actually using their laptops, which was so distracting for them that they didn't realize they had missed their scheduled landing destination and failed to answer radio messages from the ground controller.

If texting while driving is dangerous, surely it is more dangerous flying while surfing the net. This is compounded when the lives of 144 people are at stake. The pilots claim that they were mulling over some complicated crew scheduling software, but does it matter what they were doing? All that matters is they were not flying the aircraft.

Every time I fly the flight attendant requires passengers to shut off all personal electronic devices. If it is important for the passengers to do this, surely it is more important for the pilots. The flight attendants should check the cockpit first and see what the pilots are doing. I'd feel better if I knew they were flying the plane, not playing sudoku.

Currently, according to the Wall Street Journal, Federal safety rules don't prohibit laptops from cockpits. I think that should change. Better yet, perhaps airlines should require pilots to check their personal computers with the flight attendants before they enter the cockpit. A beeper might even be installed in the cockpit to sound an alarm if a personal computer is turned on. I, for one, feel that a personal computer has no place in the cockpit of an airplane.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Lawrence Egerton

AIG denies liability in Hudson River plane crash

Pierce Egerton — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 14:04:26 GMT

Most of us still remember the dramatic crash landing of US Airways Flight 1549, when Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger piloted a plane bound for Charlotte, NC into the Hudson River after a bird strike disabled its engines. Thanks to the quick thinking of Sullenberger and the flight crew, every passenger was evacuated before the plane sank.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSPsrhCPt-0

Now, however, insurance giant AIG is citing the flight crew’s heroics as a reason US Airways doesn’t have to compensate the passengers. Aviation liability insurance operates under different rules than regular insurance; it requires a finding of negligence on the part of the airline before any money is paid out. Ironically, the daring rescue of Flight 1549’s passengers- and the public’s fascination with the story- is giving AIG reason to deny liability and keep passengers from recouping their damages.

This is bad news for passengers, given the likelihood of post traumatic stress disorder among survivors of an airplane crash. The New York Times reports that Tess Sosa, a passenger on the plane with her husband and two young children, is struggling to cope with the ordeal, but can’t afford therapy because of her health insurance’s high deductible for mental health care.

AIG- who were bailed out by the government last fall during the financial meltdown- have so far offered each passenger $5,000, while offering $10,000-20,000 to certain other passengers with greater property loss. To get any money, they will have to sign a release of all claims. Airline crash investigations can drag on for months and something proving liability might still be discovered; anyone who accepts the offer would then be left out in the cold.

For the time being, AIG is holding out. As Ms. Sosa puts it, “It’s like telling me, ‘We aren’t responsible for this. This is your trauma. You deal with it.’”

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Pierce Egerton

NTSB Issues "Urgent" Safety Recommendations to DC Metro Authority

Pierce Egerton — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 06:59:00 GMT

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) released a statement Monday containing “Urgent Safety Recommendations” for the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) in the wake of last month’s deadly Metro accident. The investigators said the electrical train control system should fail safe by stopping a train whenever detection of a preceding train is lost. They called on WMATA to use real time data to automatically generate alerts when information on track occupancy is lost or interrupted.

In a second “urgent recommendation” the NTSB asked the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) to “advise all rail transit operators with train control systems capable of monitoring train movements to evaluate their systems for adequate safety redundancy.”

“While the NTSB is still in the very early stages of its investigation into this tragic accident here in our nation's capital," said Acting Chairman Mark V. Rosenker, "we have concerns about the failure of WMATA's train control system to prevent this collision." Rosenker continued, "By calling upon WMATA to take swift action to upgrade the safety redundancy of its system and by urging FTA to alert other transit agencies of the hazards of single point failures such as the one experienced by WMATA, we hope to prevent something similar from happening again."

In accordance with NTSB protocol, the safety recommendations were issued to the heads of both agencies with a request for a response from each organization within 30 days, addressing the actions taken or planned in response to the Board's recommendation.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Pierce Egerton