In Boyd v. Deutsche Lufthansa Aktiengesellschaft, the district court dismissed the plaintiff's Montreal Convention claims arising from injuries allegedly sustained when she was knocked to the ground while proceeding in a wide corridor of the airport toward Customs. The court held that the Montreal Convention did not apply because the injuries were not sustained "in the course of any of the operations of ... disembarking," focusing on: (1) the passenger's activity at the time of the injury, (2) where the passenger was located, and (3) the extent to which the carrier was exercising control over the passen-ger at the moment of injury, the factors set forth in Day v. Trans World Airlines, Inc., 528 F.2d 31 (2d Cir. 1975).
Perhaps more interesting than the ultimate holding, however, is the court's discussion of the definition of accident; specifically, whether the accident analysis includes a second prong focusing on whether the event causing injury "was a malfunction or abnormality in the aircraft's operations" (i.e., that the airline played a causal role in the incident). This second prong, which, for example, has been applied in the First Circuit and in a slightly different form in some district courts in the Second Circuit, can be especially helpful to airlines in certain types of cases, especially passenger-on-passenger tort cases. Unfortunately, while the court indicated its approval of the second prong, it ultimately did not reach a conclusion on this issue. Still, practitioners in Louisiana should be aware of this decision as an in-dication of how that court might rule in the future, and practitioners throughout the United States should be aware of this analysis and attempt to in-corporate it into their defense in jurisdictions where the relevant Circuit Court of Appeals has not expressly rejected it. Boyd v. Deutsche Lufthansa Aktiengesellschaft, 2015 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 72482 (E.D. La. Jun. 3, 2015).
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