This article is published in Aviation Week & Space Technology and is free to read until Jun 19, 2024. If you want to read more articles from this publication, please click the link to subscribe.
A Canadian judge has found Ukraine International Airlines (UIA) liable for the deaths of 176 passengers and crew on board a flight shot down by Iranian surface-to-air missiles.
The airline now faces unlimited compensation for those killed.
The case was held in Canada as many Canadians of Iranian origin were on board the stricken aircraft. The judgment followed an 18-day trial in Toronto that ended in January.
The Ontario Superior Court held that UIA was negligent in allowing flight PS752 to depart Tehran on Jan. 8, 2020, at a time of international tension.
Days before, the U.S. had assassinated the commander of Iran’s Qods Force—the overseas arm of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani. In turn, on Jan. 8, Iranian forces launched multiple ballistic missiles at two Iraqi bases at which U.S. troops were stationed, seriously wounding several service personnel. Iran was thus on high alert for U.S. retaliatory strikes.
UIA flight PS752, operated by a Boeing 737-800, took off from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport at 6:12 a.m. local time. Minutes later, the aircraft was hit by two missiles from an Iranian air defense unit operated by the Revolutionary Guard Corps and crashed, with the loss of all on board.
Justice Jasmine Akbarali noted that, according to Iran’s investigation into the tragedy, PS752 was deconflicted and permission was obtained from the Iranian military to allow it to depart.
The judge noted that “There was absolutely no reason that PS752 should have been taken [by the air defense unit] to be anything other than a commercial jet airliner. It was flying away from Tehran, gaining altitude, flying at a speed that was expected for a commercial airliner but not for a missile, at an altitude that was not consistent with a missile, and with a working transponder system that, were secondary radar surveillance in use, would have provided the Iranian military with information about the commercial aircraft if they interrogated it.”
Akbarali said that UIA did not routinely undertake security assessments with respect to its flights. Instead, the route between Kyiv and Tehran underwent four separate security assessments, from the inception of the route some years before up to Jan. 8, 2020, the last of these just hours before the flight took off from Tehran.
“The sufficiency of these aviation security assessments is hotly contested,” the judge noted.
UIA’s director of aviation security reassessed the security situation on hearing of the Iraqi missile strikes on U.S. troops, but concluded that, while tension in the region had ratcheted up, it was still within acceptable limits for PS752 to return to Kyiv.
The court considered whether UIA breached the standard of care necessary to ensure the safety of the flight and, if so, whether that led to the loss of lives on board PF752.
UIA argued that the Tehran Flight Information Region (FIR) was not deemed to be a conflict zone, “which seems to hinge on the notion that a conflict zone must be officially declared in order to exist” the judge said, and that expert witnesses testified that Tehran FIR was, in fact, a textbook example of a conflict zone.
The judge said that “the risk assessment conducted on Jan. 8, 2020, failed to meet the standard of care required of UIA and its employees in a number of ways.”
These included a lack of information about the prevailing situation in Tehran FIR “that was reliable in breadth and in depth.” UIA also failed to take into account ICAO documents that set out “key risk factors to consider when flying over or near conflict zones” where one of the parties engaged in the conflict has access to SAMs.
The UIA staff member responsible for the security assessment failed to find open-source material that would have alerted him to several factors, including the fact that Iran had “an aggressive shoot-down policy.”
These were among several factors that “reveal UIA’s lackadaisical approach to security,” the judge said.
She concluded that “UIA breached the standard of care by failing to consider, or even attempting to consider” information identified by ICAO relating to conflict zones “and failing to seek information from all the recommended sources.”
“This is an important result for our clients who lost loved ones in the downing of Flight 752,” CFM Lawyers LLP spokesman Joe Fiorante, whose company helped represent the families of 21 of those killed in the shootdown. “For the first time, the families now have complete answers to UIA’s role in this horrible tragedy.”
The judgment means that under the Montreal Convention, the international law which governs the international carriage of passengers, UIA will not be able to limit the compensation payable to the families to $180,000 per passenger, but instead will be now obligated to pay full compensatory damages arising from the fatalities.
Aviation Week has reached out to UIA’s North American branch for comment.
Related Content
