Facing 16 lawsuits for Toronto Pearson airport crash, Delta deflects blame
The fiery landing — on Delta Flight 4819, operated by its subsidiary, Endeavor Air — sent 21 of the 80 people on board to hospital. The incident has prompted passengers to file at least 16 separate lawsuits in U.S. federal court, seeking unspecified damages.
At least 16 Canadians, who were among the 80 people on the flight, allege in lawsuits they were injured in the crash, which took off from Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport. The Canadians' civil cases were all filed in U.S. District Court in Minnesota.
"Plaintiffs claim that these injuries and losses are Delta's and Endeavor's fault, and not the fault of any other party," the companies' attorney Michael G. McQuillen wrote in a filing last month. "Defendants deny these allegations."
McQuillen said further lawsuits could be filed in the case, with "the potential for more than 70 plaintiffs." The filing, dated May 22, sought to consolidate all the lawsuits — including those filed by passengers from other states — in federal court in Minnesota.
More passengers have since filed their own civil complaints in connection with the Toronto crash. A CBC News review of U.S. court records finds five further cases were filed this week, including one lawsuit on behalf of a Canadian woman and a minor identified only as "G.O.G."
Both plaintiffs "suffered, and continue to suffer, from extreme bodily and mental injuries and economic losses as a direct result" of the hard landing, their lawsuit states. Several of the cases were filed by Minneapolis law firm Chestnut Cambronne and use similar wording.
The lawsuits allege "gross negligence and recklessness" by crew members, who were "inadequately trained and supervised" by Delta and its subsidiary. Endeavor operated the CRJ-900, built by Canadian firm Bombardier.
Dark smoke could be seen billowing from the fuselage after the mid-afternoon crash. Social media posts showed passengers left hanging upside down after the jet flipped over and came to a stop on the snowy runway.
Delta announced afterward it would offer $30,000 US to each passenger on the flight, saying the proposal comes with "no strings attached."Canada's Transportation Safety Board (TSB) found a warning system on the plane sent an alert "indicating a high rate of descent" less than three seconds before landing, according to a preliminary report published in March.
The TSB also said that less than one second before landing, the angle of the plane's aircraft, known as the pitch attitude, was one degree. The flight operations manual states pitch attitude at touchdown should be between three and eight degrees, the report said.
"It is too early to draw conclusions as to the causes of this accident," the TSB said at the time, adding a full investigation report will follow "in due course."
The allegations in the lawsuits have not been tested in court. Both Delta and the Minnesota-based attorneys who filed the lawsuits, Bryan L. Bleichner and Christopher P. Renz, did not immediately respond to CBC's requests for comment on Tuesday."The whole descent seemed to be off," one of the plaintiffs, Clayton Bouffard recently told CBC from his home in Greater Sudbury, Ont. "I remember telling my wife that we seemed to be going fast."
Bouffard said in an interview more than a month after the crash that he continued to have a sore neck and hadn't slept well ever since.
"I'm just thankful all 80 people survived that," he said. "It's amazing we all survived."
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During the Syrian civil war, more than 3,000 Palestinian refugees in the country were killed by Syrian government forces, hundreds of them by torture. Nobody blocked the Sydney Harbour Bridge over that. It's Israel's standing as a Western-style state that energizes the movement against it and that is unlikely to change no matter what shifts in protocol Western governments adopt. After all, on October 6, 2023, Gaza was functionally a Palestinian state living alongside Israel. If the pro-Palestinian groups in the West had valued that status, they should have reacted to October 7 with horror, if nothing else for the existential threat that the attacks posed to any Palestinian state-building project. Instead, many in the pro-Palestinian diaspora—and even at the highest levels of Palestinian official life—applauded the terror attacks with jubilant anti-Jewish enthusiasm. The chants of 'from the river to the sea' heard at these events reveal something important about the pro-Palestinian movement in the democratic West. The slogan expresses an all-or-nothing fantasy: either the thrilling overthrow of settler colonialism in all the land of Palestine, or else the glorious martyrdom of the noble resistance. It's not at all clear that ordinary Palestinians actually living in the region feel the same way. The exact numbers fluctuate widely depending on how the question is framed, but at least a significant minority—and possibly a plurality—of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza would accept coexistence with Israel if that acceptance brought some kind of state of their own. But their supporters living in the West can disregard such trade-offs. They can exult in the purity of passion and still enjoy a comfortable life in a capitalist democracy. These are the people that Albanese, Carney, Macron, and Starmer are trying so desperately to satisfy. They are unlikely to succeed. The Hamas terror attacks of October 7 provoked a war of fearsome scale. Almost two years later, the region is almost unrecognizable. Tens of thousands have been killed, and much of Gaza laid to ruin. Almost every known leader of Hamas is dead. Hezbollah has been broken as a military force. The Assad regime in Syria has been toppled and replaced. The United States directly struck Iran, and the Iranian nuclear program seems to have been pushed years backward, if not destroyed altogether. In this world upended, the creative minds of Western diplomacy have concluded that the best way forward is to revert to the Oslo peace process of 30 years ago. The Oslo process ended when the Palestinian leadership walked away from President Bill Clinton's best and final offer without making a counteroffer—and gambled everything on the merciless terrorist violence of the Second Intifada. Now here we are again, after another failed Palestinian terror campaign, and there is only one idea energizing Western foreign ministries: That thing that failed before? Let's try it one more time. But this time, the hope is not to bring peace to the Middle East. They hope instead to bring peace to their own streets. The undertaking is a testament either to human perseverance, or to the eternal bureaucratic faith in peace through fog.
