Frontier Airlines has filed a second lawsuit in a federal court against American Airlines, demanding its rival pay it hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation for damage that was caused to one of its airplanes during airport ground operations.
The second lawsuit, which was lodged in a Massachusetts district court last week, is connected to an incident that occurred at Boston Logan International Airport (BOS) on November 25, 2024, when an American Airlines plane collided with the wing of a parked Frontier aircraft.
According to the complaint, which has been reviewed by PYOK, the Frontier Airlines Airbus A321 aircraft had been parked correctly at Gate E14A at Boston Logan and was awaiting pushback for departure with passengers onboard the packed airplane.
Before they could push back, however, they had to wait for an arriving American Airlines aircraft to park at the adjacent gate E13. As the AA plane turned to move into this parking spot, the wing of the American Airlines plane swiped the wing and aerodynamic sharklet of the Frontier plane.
The Frontier plane had to be immediately taken out of service, and the flight was cancelled so that engineers could assess the extent of the damage, which turned out to be so bad that the aircraft was grounded for six days for extensive repairs.
According to Frontier’s attorneys, the cost of the repair alone came to
$670,387.45
Nearly a year after the accident, in September 2025, American Airlines agreed to cover half the cost of the repair, which Frontier accepted while retaining the right to recover costs and damages at a later date.
That time has now come.
Frontier is demanding American Airlines pay the oustanding $335,193.73 of the repair bill, as well as “substantial damages” for lost profits and operational costs stemming from the airplane’s grounding.
The lawsuit comes just a couple of months after Frontier sued American Airlines in a Florida court demanding more than $100,000 in damages for a seperate collision at Miami International Airport in March 2024 that grounded the Frontier plane for around six months.
Both lawsuits express frustration with safety standards at American Airlines, saying these incidents placed American Airlines “on notice of systemic deficiencies in its safety practices, training, supervision, and compliance protocols, yet American failed to implement corrective measures.”
American Airlines has yet to respond to the latest lawsuit, while the incident that occurred at Miami International Airport is slated to go to mediation in an attempt to settle the dispute.
