Here today, gone tomorrow: Airline Employees Are Not Easily Located
After an injury at an airport or onboard an aircraft, tracking down witnesses quickly is critically important. Witnesses memories may fade, people may move, get married (and change their names) or they may take a job with a different company. Metropolitan Washington Airport injury lawyer Doug Landau notes, “The sooner the liability investigation begins, the sooner determinations as to fault can be solidified. The more you wait, or the longer the delays, the greater the likelihood that evidence will get lost, witnesses will become difficult to locate and the information needed to prove negligence will be gone.”
A former ABRAMS LANDAU client was a pilot who lived in Virginia, but flew out of Newark (“EWR”) International Airport in New Jersey, so he hopped small jet to get to work almost every week. Another client who was in ticketing at Washington Dulles Airport (“IAD”), drove down to Virginia to work several days each week from her home in Bergan County, Northern New Jersey, near where Doug grew up. She even had another job at a local restaurant on the days she was not at Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority airport at Dulles. Doug Landau is aware of flight crew members who have been based in LAX, SEA, and PDX all within the last 3 years, but who have always lived in Vancouver! Another pilot-client flew for El Al out of New York City & Toronto, but had his home in Reston Virginia & rented small apartments in Tel Aviv & Germany! Landau had a client who was given a van by a fueling company so that he could drive back and forth between Dulles and Reagan National Airport every day when he was not out of the DC Metro area. There are also flight attendants and pilots that stay in “crash pads” when they live in a different location than where they are based. This is often in case they have a really early show and cannot commute that morning or if they get in really late and cannot catch a flight home until the next day. Lawyer Landau has had clients who regularly make use of these “crash pads” with their crew mates with whom they like to work, fly & travel. Flight crews (flight attendants and pilots) are then often assigned a 2, 3, or 4-day string of trips across country in which they have various hotel stays in different locations each night. They are not just going back and forth from their base.