[Peetwo]

A number of MSM news outlets are carrying the following story, courtesy of Bloomberg:
 

Malaysia Air Sued by Brother of Man Who Vanished With MH370


January 14, 2016 — 9:01 AM AEDT Updated on January 14, 2016 — 6:24 PM AEDT



Malaysian Airline aircrafts sit on the tarmac at Kuala Lumpur International Airport.

Photographer: Charles Pertwee/Bloomberg

• Jet disappeared in 2014 on flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing
  
• Lawsuit filed under Montreal Convention at Washington court
  

The brother of an American man who was a passenger on Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 when it disappeared while en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur in March 2014 sued the carrier in a U.S. court.

Phillip Talmadge Wood was on temporary assignment in Malaysia for International Business Machines Corp. when he boarded the flight to the Chinese capital, according to the complaint filed in Washington on Jan. 12 by Thomas Wood of Fort Worth, Texas.

Thomas Wood, who is managing the affairs of Philip Wood’s estate, is seeking as much as the $155,937 maximum automatically allowed under the terms of the 1999 Montreal Convention, and more unless Malaysia Airlines can prove his brother’s death was caused by something other than the negligence of the carrier or those in its employ.

Philip Wood was survived by his sons Nicholas and Christopher, according to the court filing.

"It would be inappropriate to comment on litigation matters that are ongoing,” Malaysia Air said in a statement.

Malaysia’s Department of Civil Aviation last year declared the incident, which claimed the lives of 239 passengers and crew on the Boeing Inc. 777, an accident.

Investigators concluded that someone on board intentionally disabled the aircraft’s tracking devices, and the jet turned south before plunging into the Indian Ocean off Australia’s western coast.

More than 80,000 square kilometers (31,000 square miles) of seabed have been scoured, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau said Wednesday in its weekly update. The search of the full 120,000 square-kilometer area will be completed in the middle of the year, the bureau said. The only solid evidence so far from the missing Boeing Co. 777 is a wing component that washed up in July on Reunion Island, some 3,800 kilometers (2,360 miles) from the search zone.

The multinational team hunting for the plane has said it won’t expand the southern Indian Ocean search zone without new clues about the wreck’s exact location.

The case is Wood v. Malaysian Airlines Berhad, 16-cv-53, U.S. District Court, District of Columbia (Washington).

And from 'that man' there was this again courtesy the Oz:

MH370: first suit filed as airline, insurer blasted as ‘irresponsible’

• Ean Higgins
  
• The Australian
  
• January 15, 2016 12:00AM
  

A US law expert in air crash compensation has filed the first legal suit involving a victim of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, claiming that the airline and its insurers have stonewalled against fair ­settlements.

The move comes despite some novel legal complexities, with the wreckage of the aircraft yet to be found, the cause of its disappearance unknown, and increasing opinion in aviation circles that the captain hijacked his own aircraft.

If the “rogue pilot” theory is substantiated, it could block the capacity of victims’ families to sue US aircraft manufacturer Boeing if a design flaw were found.

The managing partner of US lawyers Podhurst Orseck, Steven Marks, has filed a suit in the US District Court of Washington DC on behalf of the family of Phillip Wood, a Texan working for IBM in Asia who was one of the 239 people who died on MH370 on March 8, 2014.

Both Malaysia and China are parties to the Montreal Convention, which sets rules and proced­ures on how those affected by mishaps in aviation are to be ­compensated.

Mr Marks said Malaysia Airlines and its insurer Allianz were resisting the normal process of resolving such claims, forcing him to mount the initial lawsuit before the two-year statute of limit­ations expires in March.

“I have never seen an insurance company or an airline act so irresponsibly, so insensitively,” he told The Australian.

Under the convention, Mr Marks said, the case of Mr Wood can be tried in US courts because he was regularly domiciled in the US and his ticket was purchased through a US booking agency.

Mr Marks is also representing families of Chinese, Malaysi­an and Indian MH370 victims.

Because what such families are likely to receive in compensation can vary immensely if they are forced to pursue claims through the courts in their respectiv­e countries, airlines and their insurers will usually agree to an average compensation for all.

In this case, Mr Marks said, after nearly two years of negotiations, the airline and Allianz had “not even made any offers to the foreign families, and they have made completely inadequate offers to the US families”.

Mr Marks speculated that one reason Allianz might be resisting payouts is that it has had a trifecta of major air accidents for which it was the insurer. On top of MH370, which would have cost Allianz $US250 million to recompense Malaysia Airlines for its Boeing 777, he said it had had to fork out a similar amount for the loss of the Malaysia Airlines aircraft of the same make that was shot down in Ukraine in 2014.

Allianz was also the insurer for the Germanwings Airbus A320 flight that went down in the French Alps last March when the co-pilot locked the captain out of the cockpit and deliberately crashed the aircraft.

Mr Marks said theories that MH370 captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah hijacked his aircraft were lacking in evidence and ­“irresponsible”.

There is no suggestion that the specific Boeing 777 of Flight MH370, or that model generally, had a design flaw. But if one were to be revealed, it would be in the interests of the Malaysian government, which is the majority owner of Malaysia Airlines, for the “rogue pilot” theor­y to be disproved so plaintiffs could concentrate their lawsuits on Boeing rather than the airline.

A Malaysia Airlines spokeswoman said the airline and its insurers had “consistently endeavoured to negotiate fair and reasonable compensation in good faith with a number of claims now having been settled and many more being the subject of ­advanced discussions with a significant number of further settlements anticipated”.

Allianz did not respond to requests for comment yesterday.

And so it begins where all the directly interested parties jockey to lessen their direct liability.

Not my thing but I do wonder how much extra would be added to the MAL compensation bill if it was ever proven that their was a rogue pilot or hijack? Or on the other side of the coin if a aircraft design flaw was directly attributable to the accident, what would be the extra cost to Boeing? Certainly food for thought when it comes to ulterior motives for DIPs trying to control the narrative of the tragic disappearance of MH370.

MTF...P2