Malaysian Airline System Bhd and Boeing Co records on Flight 370’s maintenance and crew are being sought by a law firm representing the father of one of the missing flight’s passengers, the opening salvo in what may end up being a barrage of litigation over the plane’s disappearance.
The jet carrying 239 people vanished March 8 from radar after taking off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing. Malaysia’s government said March 24 the plane probably crashed in the South Indian Ocean, southwest of Perth, Australia, with no survivors, citing satellite data.
The request for information by Chicago-based Ribbeck Law Chartered on behalf of Januari Siregar is a potential prelude to the filing of a lawsuit. Siregar’s son, Firman Chandra Siregar, was a passenger on Flight 370, according to the firm.
In a filing yesterday in Illinois state court in Chicago, Siregar seeks 26 different kinds of information, including data on possible defects in the missing Boeing-built 777-200 ER or its component parts, the airline’s training of its crew and information about its cargo.
Siregar seeks “possible design and manufacturing defects that may have contributed to the disaster,” Ribbeck partner Monica Kelly said yesterday in a statement.
The law firm said the petition seeking evidence is the same request it used when it began legal proceedings against Asiana Airlines Inc after a July 6 crash of one of that carrier’s planes landing at San Francisco International Airport, also a 777-200, killed three people and injured 181.
Experts’ investigation
“That’s usually how we begin the process,” Mervin Mateo, a spokesman for the firm, said yesterday in a telephone interview about the reason for yesterday’s request. “We have our own experts doing their investigation.”
“If the wreckage is not found, there would be little or no evidence we can rely on,” Mateo said. “We are hoping against hope that they do find the wreckage of the plane and the black box.”
Even without the wreckage, litigation could be carried out based on the firm’s investigation and information about past accidents similar to Malaysian Air disappearance, according to the lawyer.
“We’re thinking it’s probably something wrong with the plane or the training of the pilots,” Mateo said, adding that a hijacking or some other cause can’t be ruled out.
Asiana suit
In the Asiana case, involving a flight from Seoul, Boeing moved the lawsuit from a state court in Cook County, Illinois, to a federal court after the manufacturer argued the flight’s path over water placed it in federal maritime jurisdiction, Mateo said. The law firm seeks to move it back to state court, and a judge will rule as soon as this month, he said.
The Malaysian government’s conclusion that Flight 370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean sparked a street protest by passengers’ families in Beijing and Chinese demands for the data behind the decision to declare there were no survivors.
The search for the plane was suspended yesterday because of foul weather. Malaysian Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak said the jet’s last position was over the Indian Ocean and the flight ended there, based on satellite data from Inmarsat Plc.
John Dern, a spokesman for Chicago-based Boeing, declined to comment on the court filing. Malaysia Airlines’ media relations office didn’t immediately respond to an e-mailed request for comment sent outside normal business hours.
US$175 million compensation
Families of those aboard the flight stand to be compensated as much as US$175,000, and possibly more, from the airline under the Montreal Convention of 1999. The international treaty requires carriers to pay damages for each passenger killed or injured in an accident, even if its cause is unknown. If the airline isn’t able to show that sole fault for the plane’s loss lies with another party — such as the airplane’s maker or terrorists — its liability under the treaty may be higher.
Most of those claims are likely to be brought in China or Malaysia, the home countries of a majority of the plane’s passengers and signatories to the convention.
Survivors’ best chance for seeking more would be to find a way to sue in the US, where awards and settlements can be more generous than in the two Asian countries.
“The US is where people want to go,” said Dorothea Capone, a lawyer with New York’s Baumeister & Samuels PC.
One such scenario, lawyers have said, would be for plaintiffs to allege that the missing 777’s manufacturer was at fault.
The case is Siregar v. Boeing Co, 14L003408, Cook County, Illinois, Circuit Court, Law Division (Chicago). — Bloomberg
Source: The Malay Mail
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