Photo credit to Roderick Eime on flickr
Surely at some point you’ve been disappointed by the Wi-Fi or entertainment experience on a flight, but to your credit, you probably handled it better than Cary David did.
David, a resident of West Orange, N.J., was so shattered by the DirecTV let-down on her February 21 return passage from Puerto Rico that she is now filing a $5 million class-action lawsuit against Wi-Fi slowpokes United Airlines. The suit alleges that the poor woman paid $7.99 for in-flight DirecTV on her four-hour United flight and received only 10 minutes (the last 10 minutes of the flight, which were the only 10 above U.S. soil) – in return.
A bummer for sure, but what’s the legal grounding here? Where could that $5 million figure possibly be coming from? In Cary M. David, et al. v. United Continental Holdings Inc., et al., David as plaintiff takes issue not with the quality of United’s DirecTV and Wi-Fi services, but instead with the airline’s failure to “disclose that the services will not work as advertised when the aircraft is outside the continental United States or is over water.” Basically, she was given no indication that she would be paying nearly $0.80/minute to watch live TV, and so that, and only that, is why she ended up the fool. And because she is not the only fool, David alleges, that liberating $5 million would be shared among a class defined as the following:
“All consumers who purchased DirecTV service or WiFi service on a DirecTV equipped plane from January 1, 2012 through and including the date a judgment is entered in this action, for a flight that flew outside of the continental United States or over water.”
So far, there’s no indication that even one of these other fools is interested in adding his or her name to the suit – nor is there clear reason to suggest David will end up victorious here. Fresh off a legal defeat at the hands of a 22-year-old ticket booking savant, United brings great clout to the battle, not to mention presumably years of internal positioning on a matter very central to today’s in-air experience. In our experience, for whatever that’s worth, the terms have been clear, and the website, though clunky (and likely irrelevant in this case), does its best to make the limitations of these services clear over and over again.
In any case, United filed a bid to dismiss the suit entirely. In a statement to Road Warrior Voices, a spokesman for the airline said:
“We believe this suit is without merit both factually and legally. On our DirecTV-equipped planes, we clearly inform our passengers in writing on the screen before they confirm their purchase that ‘Live DIRECTV programming is not available while the aircraft is outside of the continental United States’ and that ‘Wi-Fi service is available over the continental U.S.’”
Cary M. David, et al. v. United Continental Holdings Inc., et al., you have our attention.