The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has recently ruled that lightning striking an aircraft can be considered an extraordinary circumstance and exempt airlines from compensating passengers for cancellations or delays if, following this incident, it is necessary to ground the aircraft in order to carry out technical inspections to ensure safety in its future operations.
The specific case ruled on by the European High Court, which sets a precedent throughout the Union, concerns an Austrian Airlines aircraft that was struck by lightning shortly before departing from the Romanian city of Iași bound for Vienna. Following the incident, mandatory safety inspections had to be carried out, meaning that the aircraft was unable to follow its scheduled itinerary and one passenger arrived in Vienna seven hours late on a replacement flight. This was the reason why the passenger claimed compensation of €400 in the Austrian courts. However, the airline considers that the inspections the aircraft had to undergo constitute extraordinary circumstances and adds that the company took all reasonable measures to remedy the delay, which would exempt it from paying compensation under the European Passenger Rights Regulation.
The Austrian court hearing the case referred a question to the CJEU for a preliminary ruling. In its response, it noted that European rules include weather conditions incompatible with flying, such as the risk of the aircraft being struck by lightning, within the concept of “extraordinary circumstances”. Consequently, this incident is not intrinsically linked to its operating system and is therefore not inherent in the normal exercise of the activity of the airline concerned and is beyond its effective control, and would therefore constitute an extraordinary circumstance, as reasoned by the European Court of Justice.
The CJEU also emphasises that this conclusion ensures passenger protection by preventing airlines from being incentivised to prioritise flight punctuality over safety. However, in this case, the High Court specifies that it is up to the Austrian court to assess whether the airline is exempt from the obligation to pay compensation to passengers, by verifying whether it took all necessary measures to remedy the extraordinary circumstance and its consequences.
Source of information: Court of Justice of the European Union.