An American woman who sustained leg injuries while disembarking a British Airways plane at Heathrow Airport has sued for £50,000.
Melissa Phillips was flying from Israel back to her home in Maryland, via London, when she fell down ‘damp’ aircraft steps while changing flights.
Phillips, 49, blamed the carrier’s ‘negligence’ for her fall at Terminal 5 on March 21, 2023, according to High Court documents.
BA said that Phillips ‘descended the steps without looking, or adequately looking’ and likely lost her footing.
The airline has offered £6,987 to cover Ms Phillips’ medical expenses but continues to deny any responsibility for her injuries.
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Katherine Deal KC, representing Ms Phillips, said the passenger suffers from ‘some limitation of movement and loss of amenity affecting aspects of her daily life’.
She said the accident had caused the American permanent symptoms, which impair her ability to run her home, as well as ‘psychological distress’.
Ms Deal added that BA was liable for the ‘chaotic’ flight, in which the carrier failed to ‘avoid or materially reduce the risk of passengers jostling each other on overcrowded steps’.
She explained: ‘Had the steps not been full of jostling passengers, the claimant would not have been knocked off balance.’
Christopher Loxton, for BA, denied the steps used to disembark the flight Ms Phillips had taken were damp and insisted passengers had not left the plane in an ‘unusual or unexpected manner’.
He claimed Ms Phillips had herself failed to take several precautions, such as not holding the handrail and had ’caused herself to come into contact’ with other travellers while descending.
‘It is the defendant’s case that the likely cause of the claimant’s fall was simply paying insufficient attention to the way in which she was descending the steps and that she lost her footing and fell down the same steps’, he submitted.
Ms Phillips had her case dismissed by a Maryland district court in 2024 after it ruled it did not have jurisdiction over the claim, given the incident occurred in the UK.
A hearing has yet to take place.
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