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Infuriating legal case: Aer Lingus vs. Hot Chocolate Drinker

Written by Joerg Steegmueller
Infuriating legal case: Aer Lingus vs. Hot Chocolate Drinker

It is absolutely infuriating when judges make stupid judgements, but it doesn’t get much better when cases are settled.

In this case, a 12 year old boy (sitting next to his dad!) got a cup of hot chocolate and some additional milk from a flight attendant on an Aer Lingus flight from Nice to Dublin. A lid was firmly on the cup!! The boy takes the cup and opens it to put the milk inside. Then he replaces the lid and when he tries to drink, the hot chocolate pours over his leg.

He gets some burns, removes his clothes in the toilet and gets first aid. After arrival in Dublin the boy is brought to hospital and makes a good recovery.

All this is described in the Breaking News article here.

But let me unpack that! A dad buys a hot chocolate for his son (because the son is 12 years of age and because it might not be too far fetched to think that the dad did pay for it, I think we can assume that the dad had some involvement). The son then takes the lid off and does not properly put it back on again. The dad doesn’t check and clearly fails in his duty of care. So now the son screwed up and the dad screwed up.

The son pours the hot drink over his leg and gets burns. Very regrettable and not a good situation for the son, but WHERE in this did Aer Lingus have any responsibility?

The dad (because the son is only 12) sues Aer Lingus for damages and Aer Lingus pays an outrageous EUR 70,000 to the son for having done absolutely nothing wrong.

You might think that doesn’t affect you, but guess who will pay the 70,000. Not the Aer Lingus shareholders from their profits! No! Ultimately you and I will pay for it in higher prices.

So you and I pay this 12 year old boy 70,000 because he messed up when he put the lid back on and because the dad didn’t bother to check. Infuriating!!

And why did Aer Lingus pay? Probably because they expected that the judge for some nebulous reasons would decide against them and then the whole mess could cost even more. The possibility that a judge could find Aer Lingus to be guilty – which probably is based on other court cases – is infuriating in itself, by the way.

Judges (in this case Judge Kevin Cross) should have the ability to throw cases like that out immediately! And people who sue anybody in such a scandalous way should be the ones that pay.

Irish, Justice, ,

Dublin Airport and Aer Lingus are having a laugh!

Written by Joerg Steegmueller
Dublin Airport and Aer Lingus are having a laugh!

Last Friday I flew to Germany with Aer Lingus. It was an early start with a departure time of 07:00, so most people are not too keen to go for a healthy walk or jog at around 06:00 when you are on your way to the boarding gate. But Aer Lingus is considering our health and must have assumed that I was indulging the night before, because they were determined to get me to walk the calories off.

You check in Terminal 2 and you already know that for a tiny island, the airport in Dublin forces you to walk mad distances, but when you find out that your plane is not at Terminal 2 at all, but instead is parked at the Terminal that Aer Lingus is allegedly NOT using anymore, i.e. Terminal 1, then you feel that someone is having a laugh.

So you check in at Terminal 2 and then walk alllllll the way to Terminal 1 to board your flight. :-O

If that is not odd then wait for the return flight story:

On Tuesday we flew back to Dublin and arrived around 22:00. Usually you can leave the plane through the front and back door, but we were told that we will only be able to leave through the front door and that a bus will bring us to the terminal. But when we got out, there was no bus. Instead we were directed to a (new) walk way that brought us to a building that I had never seen before. I thought this is an extension of Terminal 2, but not so fast! We entered the building through the door on the right and were told to queue at the door OUT of the building in the left. :-O What for? To wait for the bus!

So you walk from the plane to this isolated new building, enter the building just to queue again to get out. Then you take the bus and it brings you to Terminal 2 where you have another loooooong walk to passport control and exit.

Are Dublin Airport and Aer Lingus that incompetent? Have they ever seen any other airports where buses bring passengers to the terminals? The bus normally waits next to the plane and then brings you to the airport. Why do we have to walk to a terminal to enter a bus that will bring us to a terminal. The new isolated building is called “South Gates” as I found out later. It was opened in December 2017 after being built for EUR22 mio (!?) and is only used by Aer Lingus for flights to Britain and Europe. Connection to and from the terminal is only via bus.

Can anyone tell me why Terminal 2 was built? Are any flights departing from and arriving at Terminal 2? Or do we have a situation where Terminal 1 and (mostly empty) Terminal 2 are already not big enough anymore? If that is the case then the future is not looking good.

Dublin, Tourism, , ,
 
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