Judge Dismisses Delta Airlines Class Action Lawsuit over Delayed Flights
By Courtney Coren
A federal judge has dismissed a putative class action lawsuit against Delta Air Lines Inc. by Europeans who were trying to hold the airline company to European Union regulations.
Gennadiy Volodarskiy and Oxana Volodarskaya filed the Delta Airlines class action lawsuit in February 2011 after their flight from Heathrow Airport in London, England, to Chicago O’Hare International Airport was delayed for more than eight hours.
The couple argued to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois that Delta is supposed to compensate them for any flight delays or cancellations, according to European Union regulations. They argued that the EU regulation did not limit the enforcement of the law to EU member states.
“EU 261 requires airlines to provide standardized compensation to passengers for certain delays and cancellations of flights departing from or arriving in EU Member States,” the judge wrote in summary of the EU law. “Because Plaintiffs did not receive compensation for their delayed and cancelled flights, they claim that Delta violated EU 261.”
However, U.S. District Court Judge Edmond E. Chang dismissed their case against Delta on Wednesday saying that the while the European Union may require airlines to give passengers compensation when flights are delayed or cancelled, that it specifically says that its airline compensation rule does not apply to nonmember countries.
“EU 261 does not provide a cause of action that can be brought in the courts of non-Member States,” Judge Chang said in his October 17 decision. “The regulation’s enforcement provisions are all directed at mechanisms of the member states . . . So the one time that EU 261 refers to benefits or compensation in a non-member country, EU 261 says that the regulation does not apply.”
“In short, by its own terms, EU 261 does not provide a cause of action that can be brought in the courts of non-member states,” he added.
Although the judge’s ruling brings an end to this putative class action lawsuit against Delta, four other lawsuits making similar accusations against other airlines have been filed in the same federal court by the same attorneys representing this European couple.
Judge Chang said that while Delta’s first argument “that EU 261, by its own terms, does not provide for enforcement outside of EU member states” is enough to warrant dismissing the lawsuit,” he addressed Delta’s other two arguments “for the sake of completeness.”
Delta also argued that the Airline Deregulation Act and the Montreal Convention should also preclude the claim against the airline as well as international comity, when a court shows reciprocity with a court in another country by taking into account that country’s laws and judicial decisions.
The judge from the Northern District of Illinois argued that these other two arguments were not sufficient on their own — that the Airline Deregulation Act that prevents individual states in the United States from regulating price, routes or other such things, that it did not apply to the EU because the EU was not a state in the United States and that international comity would not prevent the court from taking up this case since “United States citizens are on both side of the dispute.”
The Plaintiffs are represented by Joseph Henry Bates III of Carney Bates & Pulliam PLLC, by Vladimir M. Gorokhovsky of Gorokhovsky Law Office LLC and by Jennifer Winter Sprengel of Cafferty Clobes Meriwether & Sprengel LLP.
The Delta Airlines Class Action Lawsuit is Volodarskiy, et al. v. Delta Airlines Inc., Case No. 1:11-cv-00782, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.
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