Delta Air Lines has managed to settle a coffee burn lawsuit that was filed by a passenger who claimed she was left with second-degree burns and was permanently scarred when a cup of excessively hot water slid off a defective tray table and straight into her lap.
Kimberley Hickey filed the lawsuit against Delta last March in a Michigan district court, claiming Delta was responsible for her horrific burns, not only because of the defective tray table, but also because flight attendants allegedly failed to help her.
The incident occurred on August 19, 2024, when Hickey was traveling on Delta flight DL-134 from Detroit to Amsterdam, where she was due to connect onto a onwards flights to Tanzania.
During the transatlantic flight, Hickey says she requested a cup of decaf coffee, and the flight attendants served this as a cup of “excessively hot” water alongside a sachet of decaf coffee powder.
When the flight attendant placed the cup on her tray table, it slid down the slanted and defective table and ended up in her lap.
Shockingly, Hickey says the flight attendants failed to immediately offer her medical assistance. On her return to the United States, she was immediately referred to a specialist burns center, where she was diagnosed with second and third-degree burns.
After nearly a year of litigation, Delta countered the claims, demanding the court throw out her case on the grounds that Hickey was a registered nurse who had chosen to sit in her own water-soaked clothes after the cup had spilled, and had rejected assistance from flight attendants to change into dry garments.
Delta’s argument is that if Hickey had immediately removed the soaked clothing, she would have stood a better chance of avoiding the serious burns she endured.
In any case, Delta countered that the tray table wasn’t even defective and that the hot water had spilled as a result of Hickey’s own negligence when she accidentally knocked the cup over.
Delta filed the documents with these revelations at the end of March, and on Wednesday, the court was told that Delta and Hickey had reached an out-of-court settlement through a mediator.
The details of the settlement remain confidential, so we have no idea of knowing whether Delta decided to offer some form of compensation in a bid to settle the lawsuit without continuing the court process.
In any case, the case has been dismissed with prejudice, which means that Hickey is no longer allowed to pursue any legal claims over this matter in the future.
In the last few years, we’ve seen Delta take a much firmer stance against lawsuits brought by passengers, especially when they use Article 17 of the Montreal Convention, which makes airlines liable for injuries sustained by passengers during the course of an international flight.
As you can imagine, the Montreal Convention makes it relatively easy for passengers to claim and win against airlines, with the only real defense available to airlines being that the passenger was only injured as a result of their own negligence.
In the last couple of years, Delta faced a spate of lawsuits from passengers who claimed they had been injured by a flight attendant pushing beverage carts into their legs, with the airline initially fighting back.
In each case, however, Delta eventually reached out-of-court settlements.
Even if an airline believes it has done nothing wrong, it is often easier and quicker to reach an out-of-court settlement. The main advantage of this approach, though, is to prevent any kind of negative case law that could bring about a flood of similar lawsuits in the future.
