Airline Pays Damages to Flyer in Hot Tea Scalding Case
Jeff Edwards December 18, 2015
Ryanair agreed to pay damages to a passenger who was severely injured when a cup of hot tea was dropped in his lap during a flight.
Ronald Furlong had a very bad Ryanair flight. According to the 33-year-old’s attorneys, things began to go wrong for Furlong shortly after flight attendants began beverage service on the infamous August 2012 flight. Furlong says that a crew member passing a cup of boiling hot tea to his neighbor instead accidentally dropped the scalding drink in Furlong’s lap.
According to court documents, this is when things went from bad to worse. Furlong claims he faced “immediate pain” from his abdomen, genitals and thighs. The pain was so intense that Furlong says he jumped into the aisle in a panic and was forced to hurriedly remove his clothes which had been soaked in scalding liquid – all while a plane full of strangers looked on. Furlong spent the remainder of the flight in an empty exit row seat attempting to treat and dress his wounds.
Furlong claims to have suffered long-lasting adverse effects resulting from his injuries and sought damages in a personal injury lawsuit filed in Dublin. The suit blamed Furlong’s injuries directly on the negligence of the airline and its employee.
Since the accident, Ryanair, a company not known for its customer service, insisted that Furlong was at fault, saying he had caused the tea to be spilled and was guilty of being careless and not paying attention as the flight attendant served drinks. The company vowed to vigorously fight Furlong’s claims in court, but the Daily Mail reported Thursday that Ryanair has agreed to take responsibility for the incident and will pay more than $40,000 in damages to the injured flyer. The judge presiding over the case also ordered the company to pay Furlong’s legal costs.
[Photo: Wikipedia]
Reasonable reaction of both parties and reasonable decision - bravo to this court. It's not like he bought a boiling coffee from McDonalds and put it between his legs ....
Of course they'll have to be responsible, there have been enough cases where people have tried using Article 17 from the Warsaw Convention that it's pretty clear this will be defined as an "accident." However, the typical knee-jerk overreaction of "long-lasting adverse effects" and running around without his clothes off are pretty ridiculous. How do you even prove any of that? Also, this makes me wonder why hot drinks are still served in open containers. I don't drink hot things, especially not on planes. How have there not been thousands of incidents where hot tea or coffee has spilled all over someone? All it takes is a little turbulence, an FA dropping a cup on a passenger (like this), someone reclining their seatback, bumping your neighbor's cup, etc. There are so very many ways an open cup of scalding liquid could be spilled, why hasn't something been done to prevent this? It's not practical to just ban things like coffee, but surely there has to be a better way than open containers.