The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) dealt with a pair of aviation appeals on Thursday, issuing advisory judgments after queries from courts in Austria and Spain.

In both instances, it sided with airlines over the appellants — with a passenger seeking compensation for a lightning-enduced seven-hour delay, and with a woman seeking additional non-material damages for her lost dog in the other.

Lightning strikes can constitute ‘extraordinary circumstances’ and limit liability

In the first case, a passenger who experienced a lengthy delay waiting for a flight from Iasi in Romania to Vienna in Austria used a German online service specilalizing in seeking compensation from airlines to claim €400 (roughly $465) in damages. 

Austrian Airlines, meanwhile, argued that a lightning strike on the plane shortly before it landed in Iasi, which led to mandatory safety inspections, constituted extraordinary circumstances and so limited its legal liability for the delay.

The court found that a lightning strike can count as extraordinary circumstances, provided that the airline could “show that it took all reasonable measures to avoid the extraordinary circumstances and the consequences thereof, such as a long delay.” It was up to the court in Austria to determine if this was the case, the CJEU said. 

It noted that the mandatory checks are a measure seeking to ensure safety. The CJEU said its finding was partly aiming to prevent airlines “from being encouraged not to take the necessary measures and to prioritize the maintaining and punctuality of their flights over that objective of safety.”

While the notion might sound alarming, lightning strikes are fairly common in aviation. Most estimates suggest a commercial airliner is likely to be hit by lightning once or twice a year on average, depending on factors like the weather on the route or routes it flies.

Modern design features, redundancies for core systems, and an aircraft’s aluminium fuselage acting as a Faraday cage mean that strikes, which in decades past caused some major plane crashes, very rarely pose a serious threat to a modern passenger plane in flight. However, they can cause damage which should then be repaired on the ground.

Pets transported in the hold count as luggage, not passengers

Thursday’s second case involved an event that you’d expect to prove rather less common than lightning strikes delaying a flight. 

A Spanish woman was suing the Iberia airline, after her dog was lost at the airport in Buenos Aires. 

“The dog escaped while being carried to the plane and could not be recovered,” the CJEU said in summary. 

The passenger claimed compensation of €5,000 (roughly $5,800) for non-material damage suffered as a result of the loss of her dog. 

Iberia, meanwhile, accepted its liability and the woman’s entitlement to compensation, but argued that this should be within the limit laid down for compensation for lost luggage. 

The Spanish court hearing the case referred it to the CJEU, asking whether the concept of “baggage” in the Montreal Convention governing air travel incorporated or excluded pets traveling with passengers. 

“According to the Montreal Convention, other than carriage of cargo, aircrafts perform international carriage of persons and baggage,” the CJEU wrote summarizing its judgment. 

“The concept of ‘persons’ corresponds to that of ‘passengers,’ with the result that a pet cannot be considered to be a ‘passenger,'” it said. “Consequently, for the purposes of air travel, a pet is falls within the concept of ‘baggage’ and the compensation for the damage resulting from the loss of a pet is subject to the liability rules for baggage.”

It noted that the passenger had not submitted a special declaration of interest in delivery, a formal step that involves paying an additional fee, that would have allowed them to increase the liability limit for the precious cargo.

It said it found that EU rules on animal welfare protection did not preclude pets from being considered “baggage” for the purposes of aviation litigation, “upon the condition that full regard is paid to animal welfare requirements while they are transported.”

Edited by: Roshni Majumdar