"My Plane Dove Into the Hudson and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt"

It's hard to believe that you can survive a traumatic experience like a plane crash and then have to worry about how to pay for your medical bills. But that's the current state for many of the passengers of Flight 1549, the USAirways flight that, after having its engines conk out due to flying into a flock of geese, emergency landed in the Hudson River five months ago.

The New York Times is reporting that AIG, the insurance giant that provided the aviation insurance to USAirways, is balking over compensating the survivors of Flight 1549. According to a USAirways spokesperson, all passengers were paid $5,000 for what USAirways calls "their immediate needs"--which in my opinion was a nice gesture of goodwill that they weren't under any obligation to do. And while not mentioned in the article, I think it's safe to say that the airline provided gratis travel to family members of those injured, as well as to fly the survivors to wherever they needed to go. While USAirways got a lot of good press that undoubtedly helped their business, they have acted very decently towards the Flight 1549 survivors.

As the NYT's story points out, making insurance claims in the case of an airplane crash is not as straightforward as a claim on your homeowner's insurance. For example, when the chimney on my house was struck by lightning, I called my insurance carrier, got three quotes, and received a check to make the necessary repairs.

Because in the case of Flight 1549, there was no fault on the part of the pilot or the plane itself: like the thunderbolt that hit my chimney, birds flying into the engines constitute what the insurance industry calls an "act of God".

As the Times story states, "If there is no negligence, then arguably there is no liability, and no obligation [for insurance carrier AIG] to pay claims." So that leaves the passengers with legitimate claims at a bit of a stalemate with AIG. The irony is that if the pilot hadn't landed the plane so expertly and people on board were killed or more severely injured, the victims and the survivor's families would have a better chance of getting money from AIG than what actually happened.

Apparently AIG is telling Flight 1549 passengers to use their own insurance to pay for things like the concussion or broken leg they suffered. But as passenger Tess Sosa points out, there are some injuries that can't be treated with a plaster cast and a band-aid.

Sosa, her husband, and two small children were on the flight (Sosa was sitting with one child, her husband was seated in a different part of the plane with the other), and says that the trauma she experienced and the guilt she feels running towards an exit with her son, leaving her husband and other child behind, haunts her.

Certainly other passengers will be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder--how could you go through an experience like that and not have some psychological issues about what happened?

These passengers do not strike me as money-grubbing people trying to stick it to AIG. It seems that being compensated for medical bills and subsequent therapy is reasonable. But, as the NYT piece points out, it may take passengers months and maybe years before AIG compensates them for their medical bills for injuries immediately after the crash, and no guarantee of any money for things such as therapy.

I can't help but think that this is AIG's way of figuratively shrugging its shoulders and saying "we're bankrupt, the government has told us to buckle down on our operations, we're simply doing what the government directed us to do."

I don't think that the window of opportunity has closed yet for AIG to do what I think is the right thing to do and provide monetary compensation to the passengers. It's like the old car repair ads of "pay me now or pay me later"--the pay me now is always cheaper than the pay me later, where in this case the passengers are all going to lawyer up (a few of them already have), and file a class action lawsuit. And somehow I have a feeling a jury is not going to believe that AIG doesn't owe these people some money.