MH370: Missing Malaysia Airlines flight 'will be found'

[former9thward]

25. What large monetary settlements?

“The rules are clear,” adds Robert Alpert Sr., senior counsel and co-leader of a crisis management practice at the Atlanta law firm Morris Manning & Martin. The Montreal Convention, Alpert points out, has a two-tiered approach: It grants up to $175,000 in automatic compensation regardless of fault for proven damages, but also allows for unlimited damages above that if the airline can be proved negligent. Payouts for previous crashes in which negligence was proved were high: Pan Am had to pay a total of more than $500 million when Flight 103 was blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland (the plaintiffs prevailed in their claim that the airline was to blame for lax security), and ComAir paid $264 million in the case of Flight 5191, which crashed in Lexington, Ky., in 2006 after pilots used the wrong runway during takeoff.

But in the case of MH370, unless they find the airplane, the cockpit voice recorder, and the flight data recorder — and those devices can categorically prove terrorism or some other form of negligence — there’s a distinct possibility these families will get little or nothing above the standard $175,000. This crash, Alpert says, “might turn out to be very inexpensive.”

http://fortune.com/2014/05/01/the-big-money-surprise-about-malaysia-airlines-flight-370/