Judge: City not responsible in teen’s deadly fall from plane

[struggle4progress]

By Cameron Steele And Gary L. Wright
[e-mail]
Posted: Wednesday, Mar. 06, 2013

... Authorities determined the North Mecklenburg High School sophomore likely sneaked onto the tarmac of Charlotte-Douglas International Airport and climbed into the wheel well of US Airways Flight 1176, bound for Boston.

The lawsuit, filed in November 2012, says the defendants should have done more to prevent Tisdale from getting onto the tarmac and into the plane’s wheel well. It sought damages in excess of $10,000 ...

The news release said the lawsuit alleged that the city was liable for the wrongful death of Tisdale based on claims that the city breached a duty to reasonably secure the airport and failed to adequately warn the public about the dangers of entering a restricted area and boarding a plane as a passenger in the wheel well of an airplane ...

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/03/06/3897669/judge-city-not-responsible-in.html

[Scuba]

1. Really? "... failed to adequately warn ..."

What kind of person needs to be warned that "... boarding a plane as a passenger in the wheel well of an airplane ..." is hazardous?
And just how could you possibly get through to someone who didn't already understand that?

[struggle4progress]

3. Many people indeed seem to grasp intuitively the idea that stowing-away in an airplane wheel-well

might not produce a happy trip, though every now and then somebody finds it an exciting new travel idea worth testing. I remember when photos of a 14yo Australian kid falling from a wheel-well splashed across newspaper front pages in early 1970 and a few cases since. But a little internet research suggests that the idea might more popular than I thought:

... In 2000 ... the FAA counted 13 such stowaways, three of whom survived. In 2001, six tried to enter the United States in such a fashion, with no survivors. In 2002, five perished and one survived. (The wheel-well survival rate since 1947 is 20.3 percent.) The death estimates may be low, as some bodies may have tumbled out into water or remote areas, never to be recovered. There is, however, the occasional miracle case, none more fantastic than the tale of Fidel Maruhi. The Tahitian native lived through a 7-and-a-half-hour flight from Papeete to Los Angeles. When he was discovered, Maruhi's body temperature was just 79 degrees, about 6 degrees colder than what's usually considered fatal. Repatriated to Tahiti after his feat, Maruhi later said that he remembers nothing of the trip, having blacked out just after takeoff ...

Do Jet Stowaways Ever Survive?
The dangers of traveling beneath business class.
By Brendan Koerner|Updated Wednesday, Dec. 31, 2003, at 2:07 PM

... "I heard a monstrous bang. I thought someone had been hit by a car. There were two fellows going to church and they said there’s a dead body in the street," said Annie Williams ... Mortlake is just 10 miles (16 kilometers) from Heathrow Airport and it lies directly under the flight path of planes approaching Heathrow's south runway. Investigators ... believe the man tried to smuggle himself into England by stowing away in the landing-gear bay of a passenger plane ... If this is indeed what happened, London will have seen two unsuccessful plane stowaway attempts in just over two weeks. On Aug. 23, the dead body of a suspected stowaway was found in the landing-gear bay of a British Airways flight that had landed at Heathrow after a flight from Cape Town ...

Stowaway Might Have Survived International Flight in Wheel Well
By: Eli MacKinnon, Life's Little Mysteries Staff Writer
Date: 12 September 2012 Time: 10:13 AM ET

... Dr. Stephen Veronneau, of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, has found that 96 people have fallen out of the wheel wells of planes alone since 1947 ...

Report: All People Do is Stowaway On Then Fall Out of Planes
by James Plafke | 1:40 pm, September 14th, 2012

[tularetom]

2. Glad to see it was thrown out

You can't litigate stupid.