© 2013 The Texas Lawbook.
By Mark Curriden
Senior Writer for The Texas Lawbook
(July 11) – A federal judge has dismissed a five-year-old class action lawsuit against Southwest Airlines brought by passengers from Alabama to Texas who claimed the Dallas-based airline flew planes that violated federal “airworthiness directive” safety measures.
Plaintiffs in the case, which were seeking class action certification, were seeking damages as high as $400 million.
U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor in Dallas tossed the case against Southwest after he discovered that none of the original plaintiffs in the complaint had ever flown on one of the planes they claimed were in violation of federal rules.
The judge also rejected claims brought by passengers who did fly on the planes in question but only sought to join the lawsuit last year as intervenors. Judge O’Connor ruled that the statute of limitations, which requires plaintiffs to sue within four years of the alleged injury, expired before the intervenors joined the case.
“None of the original Texas plaintiffs had standing to bring their claims… because none of them flew on such a flight. Therefore, they could not suffer an injury,” Judge O’Connor said in his 17-page opinion. “This defect defeated the Court’s jurisdiction from the outset.”
Judge O’Connor, in summarizing the facts, said the case has “a long, complicated procedural history.”
The original lawsuits were filed in 2008 by passengers in Alabama and Texas who claimed Southwest broke its contract with customers by carrying them on planes that had missed safety inspections over several years.
Federal regulators found that Southwest had flown tens of thousands of flights between 2005 and 2008 on aircrafts that had not been properly inspected. In 2009, Southwest agreed to pay $7.5 million in fines as part of a settlement the company reached with the Federal Aviation Administration.
Judge O’Connor said that the law requires that “a litigant must demonstrate that it has suffered a concrete and particularized injury that is either actual or imminent, that the injury is fairly traceable to the defendant, and that it is likely that a favorable decision will redress that injury.”
“The Court is not persuaded that plaintiffs suffered an injury due to the alleged ‘widespread systematic failure by Southwest’ when they cannot show that they flew on an aircraft that was in any way defective,” the judge ruled.
Judge O’Connor said the intervenor plaintiffs are free to file a new lawsuit, but he said they were unlikely to prevail because the statute of limitations on their potential claims has expired.
“We are obviously pleased with the court’s decision,” said Southwest Airlines General Counsel Mark Shaw. “This litigation has been ongoing for quite some time and we think this is the right result.”
Shaw praised Southwest Associate General Counsel Stacy Cozad and the airline’s outside counsel for doing “a fantastic job in obtaining the dismissal of these cases.”
The outside counsel is Eric Pinker, a partner at Lynn Tillotson Pinker & Cox. Kent Krabill, a senior associate at Lynn Tillotson, also played a significant role in the case.
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