MILAN – The European Court of Justice ruled Thursday that airlines may be liable to harm caused by hot coffee. The European Union’s top court ruled on a dispute involving a carrier founded by the late-Formula One motor-racing champion Niki Lauda.
The case relates to an incident that occurred in 2015 when a 6-year-old girl was burned on a flight after her father’s hot coffee spilled onto her. The actual cause of the spill remains unknown. The airline, Niki Luftfahrt GmbH, contended that because the incident was not sudden nor unexpected, the spill cannot be considered an “accident,” and thus the airline cannot be held liable for damages.
According to the Court, the ordinary meaning given to the concept of ‘accident’ is that of an unforeseen, harmful and involuntary event. Furthermore, the Court notes in particular that the Montreal Convention is intended to lay down a system of strict liability for airlines while maintaining an ‘equitable balance of interests’.
The Court concluded that both the ordinary meaning of the concept of ‘accident’ and the objectives of the Montreal Convention preclude subjecting the liability of airlines to the condition that the damage is due to the materialisation of a hazard typically associated with aviation or to there being a connection between the ‘accident’ and the operation or movement of the aircraft.
The Court recalled that the Montreal Convention allows airlines to exclude or limit their liability. An airline may be exonerated from its liability or limit it by proving that the passenger himself caused or contributed to the damage.
In addition, an airline may limit its liability to 100 000 ‘Special Drawing Rights’2 by proving that the damage was not caused by its negligence or that it was caused solely by the negligence of a third party.
The Court therefore answered the Oberster Gerichtshof (Austria’s Supreme Court) that the concept of ‘accident’ at issue covers all situations occurring on board an aircraft in which an object used when serving passengers has caused bodily injury to a passenger, without it being necessary to examine whether those situations stem from a hazard typically associated with aviation.
The ruling guides what the Austrian supreme court does next in this case. It means the girl could be in line for compensation from Niki—though as the carrier went bust in 2017, she might have difficulty in collecting it.
Her case joins a long list of hot-coffee-related suits, the most famous of which remains the 1994 McDonald’s coffee case—often misremembered as an example of frivolous but successful lawsuits, despite the fact that McDonald’s definitely served the coffee at an unsafe heat, and knew it was doing so.
