Delivery of a passenger ticket

As many readers will be aware one of the two grounds upon which the Warsaw Convention denies an air carrier the right to the protection of limited liability with respect to the international carriage of passengers is the failure of the carrier to deliver an appropriate ticket prior to carriage. Article 3(1) of the Convention requires delivery of a passenger ticket containing specified particulars, of which one is

“a statement that the carriage is subject to the rules relating to liability established by the Convention”.

Article 3(2) states that

“… if the carrier accepts the passenger without a passenger ticket having been delivered he shall not be entitled to avail himself of those provisions of this Convention which exclude or limit his liability”.

Courts in various jurisdictions—predominantly in the United States—have construed these provisions in such a way that air carriers act at their own peril if either the required Convention notice is in unreasonably fine print or if ticket delivery occurs “on the steps” of the aircraft (or not at all). The rationale is quite simple. The purpose of providing a passenger with a ticket containing an adequate reference to the unusual regime of limited liability which the Convention prescribes is to afford the passenger an opportunity to purchase alternative personal accident insurance should he so desire. This purpose is not achieved if the Convention reference in the ticket is unnoticeable or if delivery occurs too late in the embarkation process for flight insurance to be obtained. In contemporary terms the rationale may seem somewhat specious, particularly since carriage by air is no longer the rarity for the mass consumer that it was in 1929 when the Warsaw Convention was adopted. However, courts which feel that the justification for the principle of limited liability has equally been eroded by time clearly cannot be expected to discard a device which the Convention itself created to enable the principle to be ignored in particular circumstances.

Nevertheless, if airlines have become well accustomed to the importance of proper delivery of tickets a recent decision of the New York Supreme Court has demonstrated that even the operation of well regulated passenger handling procedures by a major international carrier may not always suffice to protect the airline from hazard. The facts of Robyn G. Haggard et al v. Pan American World Airways Inc. (430 NYS 2d 486) may have been unusual but the decision of the trial Judge espoused principles