Delta Airlines will pay a five-figure sum to the passengers who were left “hanging upside down like bats” after their plane flipped while landing at the Toronto Pearson International Airport.
Passengers will each be paid $30,000 with “no strings attached,” according to a Delta spokesperson. That means passengers can still sue and Delta could still have to pay the resulting damages, according to aviation law experts.
The payments will total around $2.28 million.
Passengers can still sue — and many are already gearing up to do so. Canadian law firm Rochon Genova announced some passengers have retained their attorneys following the crash. Rochon Genova attorney Vincent Genova said his clients don’t think these $30,000 payments are enough and plan to seek further damages.
“We are encouraging our clients to accept the advance payments since they are being paid without prejudice to advance claims for damages exceeding the $30,000,” Genova told The Independent. “Given the severity of the injuries and trauma, my clients do not think that the advance payments are sufficient to cover their damages.”
Genova described the payments as “’advance’ or ‘hardship’ payments that are meant to offset financial hardship that families face after an accident.”
His law firm says passengers can sue for pain and suffering, loss of income, cost of healthcare and any mental health treatment if connected to a physical injury.
These passengers could be awarded up to $280,000 CAD without ever having to prove the airline was liable, according to the firm. Any damages above that would require passengers to prove liability.
This payment also does not mean Delta is admitting liability, according to The New York Times, and a passenger who wins damages in a later claim will have this initial payment deducted from the total.
All 80 people on board survived the Monday afternoon crash but twenty-one people were hospitalized, including one child. All but one person had been discharged as of Wednesday morning.
Passengers recalled dangling from their seatbelts after the Bombardier CRJ-900 flipped on the runway.
“We hit the ground and we were sideways, and then we were hanging upside down like bats,” passenger Peter Koukov told ABC News. “It all happened pretty, pretty fast. The plane was upside down, obviously, some people were kind of hanging and needed some help being helped down.”
The crash itself was quick, and that there was “no warning” beforehand, passenger John Nelson told ABC News.
“It was just incredibly fast. There was a giant firewall down the side. I could actually feel the heat through the glass,” Nelson said. “Then we were going sideways. I'm not even sure how many times we tumbled, but we ended upside down.
The Transportation Safety Board of Canada is leading the investigation with assistance from the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration.
Delta and airport officials praised the “textbook” response from emergency crews following the wreck. Others have also praised flight attendants for getting every single passenger evacuated quickly.
“These people put their lives on the line — they’re the last people off the airplane, and I think sometimes we forget that,” Graham Braithwaite, director of aerospace and aviation at Cranfield University, told The Washington Post.
Delta CEO Ed Bastian said the company’s “most pressing priority remains taking care of all customers and Endeavor crew members who were involved.”
