Dozens of Qantas passengers and crew are launching a multi-million dollar case against Airbus and a component-maker over a terrifying mid-air plunge which left scores injured, a lawyer said yesterday.
Attorney Floyd Wisner said he was representing 76 passengers and crew who were on the 2008 flight that dived steeply twice, tossing people around the cabin and forcing an emergency landing at a remote Australian air force base.
Wisner refused to put a figure on the compensation sought from Europe’s Airbus and US firm Northrop Grumman, which made a data unit on the plane, but said it would be in the millions of dollars.
Among the mostly Australian group he is representing, which also includes passengers from Britain, Sri Lanka, India and Singapore, are the three Qantas pilots who were on the flight, he said.
The Airbus A330-300 was flying at 11,280m as it made its way from Singapore to Perth on Oct. 7, 2008 when the autopilot disengaged and the plane suddenly nose-dived, plunging 200m.
After the pilots brought it back to altitude, the plane went into another plunge and dropped another 122m, again throwing passengers and loose items around the plane and injuring more than 100 people.
“Some had broken limbs, spinal injuries, severe lacerations to their scalps,” Wisner said. “Others had a combination of lesser physical injuries and psychological injuries. Some have more psychological injuries.”
“People flew up to the ceiling, hit their head on the [luggage] bins, and then remained up on the ceiling for what to them seemed like an unusual amount of time only to come crashing down on top of other people,” he said.
Many of the passengers were so traumatized by the experience they are no longer able to fly, he said.
He said he believed the captain of the flight, a former “top gun pilot from the US Navy,” had not flown since.
“He has told me that when the plane went out of control, the computer would not give him back control of the plane and he said it was in a dive,” Wisner told ABC Radio. “All he could see was the ocean. He has never been as frightened as he was at that point despite all his prior military aircraft training.”
Wisner, whose practice is devoted to aviation cases, said he had been contacted by Australian lawyers to work on the compensation claims before the statute of limitations expired on Oct. 7 this year.
He said if the claims were not settled, he expected the case to go to trial in the US within two years.
Qantas, which prides itself on its safety record, said the incident was an “exceptionally rare event,” and the Australian Transport Safety Bureau has yet to release its final report into the cause of the plunges. It said it had already settled a number of claims over the incident.
A US YouTuber who caused outrage for filming himself kissing a statue commemorating Korean wartime sex slaves has been sentenced to six months in prison, a court in Seoul said yesterday. Johnny Somali, 25, gained notoriety several years ago for recording himself doing a series of provocative stunts in South Korea and Japan, and streaming them on platforms such as YouTube and Twitch. South Korean authorities indicted Somali — whose real name is Ramsey Khalid Ismael — in 2024 on public order violations and obstruction of business, and banned him from leaving the country. “The court has sentenced him to six months in
Former Lima mayor Rafael Lopez Aliaga, a Peruvian presidential hopeful, gathered hundreds of supporters in Lima on Tuesday and gave authorities 24 hours to annul the first round of the country’s election over allegations of fraud. Lopez Aliaga is locked in a tight three-way race with two other candidates for second place in Sunday’s vote. The election runner-up wins a ticket to June’s presidential run-off against front-runner Keiko Fujimori. “I am giving them 24 hours to declare this electoral fraud null and void,” said Lopez Aliaga, surrounded by a crowd of several hundred supporters. “If it is not declared null and void tomorrow,
PAPAL RETORT: Pope Leo told reporters that he has ‘no fear, neither of the Trump administration nor speaking out loudly about the message of the Gospel’ US President Donald Trump has feuded with Pope Leo XIV over the Iran conflict — setting off an unholy row that could have serious political implications for the Republican leader back in the US. Trump has drawn barbs even from some allies over the attacks on the US-born pontiff, who has criticized the Trump administration over its immigration crackdown, the intervention in Venezuela and the Iran war. The president risks alienating the religious right in November’s crucial US midterm elections. So far the unprecedented clash between the leader of the most powerful military on Earth and the head of the world’s 1.4 billion
A 16-year-old boy has been charged with murder and aggravated sexual abuse in Florida in the death of his 18-year-old stepsister on a Carnival Cruise ship, the US Department of Justice said on Monday. Timothy Hudson was initially charged in February and subsequently indicted on March 10, but the breadth of the case was not known until a seal was lifted on Friday last week, weeks after US District Judge Beth Bloom in Miami said that he would be prosecuted as an adult at the request of the government. Anna Kepner had been traveling on the Carnival Horizon ship in November last
RSS