Opinion ID: 755762
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Irregularities in Icelandair's Transport of Erna and the Girls

Text: 14 In addition to evidence of the above events, plaintiffs presented evidence of airline irregularities in Erna's check-in and departure on the May 1st Flight 614. First, although the names on the reservations had been changed to Karlsson on April 24, the tickets were nontransferable, and new tickets were not issued in the name Karlsson; the names on the tickets remained Hilmarsson. Thus, Erna and the girls were allowed to check in for and depart on Flight 614 despite the fact that there were no reservations in the names shown on their tickets. Further, the provisional passports then possessed by Erna and the girls showed their true names, Erna Eyjolfsdottir, Elizabeth Jeanne Pittman, and Anna Nicole Grayson. Notwithstanding a provision in Icelandair's customer service manual instructing employees checking in passengers to compare name in passport to name on ticket, Erna and the girls were allowed to travel on Flight 614 despite the fact that the names on their passports matched neither the Hilmarsson names on their tickets nor the Karlsson names on their reservations. 15 Further, the Icelandair passenger manifest for the May 1st Flight 614 was falsified to conceal the presence of Erna and her daughters. Icelandair assigns a weight and balance code to each passenger as part of its check-in process. Those codes--M for male, F for female, C for child--represent different average passenger weights and are important for weighting and balancing the aircraft. Olav Ellerup, Icelandair's senior passenger supervisor at JFK Airport, testified that if one were searching for a woman traveling alone with two children, examination of the weight-and-balance column on the passenger manifest would be the quickest way to locate such a group. On the manifest for the May 1st Flight 614, however, though Helgi Hilmarsson (traveling as a Karlsson) was properly coded M, the three female Karlsson passengers were not coded F, C, C, which would have signified a woman traveling with two children, but rather were coded as M, F, C, indicating a man and a woman traveling with one child. 16 Ellerup was the employee whose initials appeared on the Flight 614 passenger manifest next to the entries for the Karlsson passengers, indicating that he checked them in, in disregard of the discrepancies among the names on the reservations, tickets, and passports, and made the false designations of gender and adulthood on the manifest. Ellerup testified at trial that checking in passengers was not a normal part of his duties and that he had not checked in any passengers on May 1. He surmised that he had forgotten to log off the airline's computer system and that someone else had checked in passengers under his initials. Icelandair had admitted, however, that Ellerup ha[d] checked-in thousands of passengers as a check-in supervisor. (Icelandair Trial Memorandum at 6.) Further, it had stipulated that Ellerup was responsible for ensuring that the 'Karlssons' held reservations and passenger tickets for Icelandair Flight 614 on May 1, 1992, and that on that day they were checked-in for Flight 614 at JFK by ... Ellerup. (Id. at 5). 17 Plaintiffs also presented evidence that Jonsson, Erna's stepfather who paid for the tickets for Erna and the girls, was chief of the duty-free store at Keflavik Airport and was known to Icelandair executives, including its vice president for operations in the Americas. Further, according to a witness who was a passenger on an Icelandair flight with Erna and Elizabeth in 1993, the year after Elizabeth's removal to Iceland, Icelandair gave Erna and Elizabeth highly preferential treatment, practically fawn[ing] over them, which a flight attendant told the witness was because the Icelandair employees knew Jonsson, Elizabeth's grandfather. 18