Defending Airline Passenger Claims: Injury Suits and DOT Consumer Enforcement

This dynamic one-hour program examines proven strategies for obtaining dismissal, judgment on the pleadings, and summary judgment in passenger injury and discrimination litigation against airlines. Drawing from recent federal decisions and real-world litigation experience, the program focuses on how airlines can successfully leverage the Montreal Convention, Airline Deregulation Act (ADA), federal preemption doctrines, pleading deficiencies, causation principles, and Rule 12 and Rule 56 practice to terminate litigation before costly discovery or trial.

Attendees will gain practical insights into identifying threshold defenses, framing preemption arguments, attacking deficient pleadings, and using procedural tools to narrow or eliminate claims at the earliest stages of litigation. The presentation will feature recent case studies demonstrating how airlines have successfully defeated claims ranging from discrimination allegations and disability accommodation disputes to mask-mandate litigation, international carriage claims, and creative tort and RICO theories.

This session will provide attendees with a current roadmap for defeating passenger claims through effective use of federal preemption doctrines, procedural defenses, and strategic motion practice, while highlighting recent decisions that are reshaping airline litigation nationwide.

This session maps the current, fragmented state of DOT airline consumer-protection enforcement after two years of whiplash. We begin with the two Biden-era pillars — the April 2024 automatic refund rule (14 CFR Part 260), backstopped by its statutory codification at 49 U.S.C. § 42305 under Section 503 of the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024, and the companion ancillary-fee transparency rule — and trace how each fared through 2025–2026. The refund regime largely survives and, because its core obligations (the 7-business-day and 20-day refund deadlines, refund-on-request, and notification duties) are locked in by statute, cannot be undone by APA litigation or a change in administration; only discrete pieces, such as the flight-renumbering trigger, sit under a temporary enforcement pause. The ancillary-fee rule met the opposite fate: vacated en banc by the Fifth Circuit in February 2026 and formally repealed by DOT in July 2026, returning the industry to the 2011 disclosure baseline. Against that backdrop, we examine the Trump DOT’s broader deregulatory pivot — the withdrawn cash-compensation rulemaking, the “Refund III” reconsideration of what counts as a cancellation, and OACP’s shift from aggressive penalties to a warning-first compliance model, including the Southwest and Frontier penalty rollbacks. Attendees will leave able to distinguish what is statutorily mandatory from what is regulatory, paused, or gone, and equipped with a practical framework for auditing airline compliance systems and advising clients on refund processing, fee-disclosure exposure, and the realities of the current enforcement environment.