60 plan to sue airlines over blood clots

By SCOTT MacLEOD and PAUL YANDALL

Sixty people are preparing to sue Air New Zealand and four other airlines for millions of dollars after suffering blood clots.

The travellers say clots formed after they took long flights crammed into "cattle-class" seats. They claim the airlines should have warned them of the dangers.

In what appears to be a world-first, Melbourne law firm Gordon and Slater said yesterday that it would issue writs against Air NZ, Qantas, British Airways, Japan Airlines, and Air France early next year. The claims could be for up to $A60,000 ($76,987) each.

Lawyer Paul Henderson said his firm started getting phone calls two months ago, after 28-year-old Emma Christofferson died from a clot that allegedly formed during a flight from Australia to England.

The firm went public yesterday with the news that it was acting for 10 people - and 50 more people phoned within a few hours.

Mr Henderson said that at least one of the initial 10 people suffered a blood clot after an Air NZ flight. She was a woman, came from a country outside Australasia, and was injured within the past three months after a 16-hour flight from Los Angeles to Australia, via Auckland.

He said the woman was yet to give final instructions about taking part in the legal action. He was unable to say how many other people were lodging claims against Air NZ, because the firm was too busy dealing with the flood of calls.

Air NZ spokesman Cameron Hill said the airline was yet to be contacted about blood-clot legal action.

"We've read a media report, but we've not been approached by the [law] company," he said. "We are not going to comment on something we've heard nothing about."

New Zealander Stacey Wilson, who suffered a blood clot after a flight on Japan Airlines from Australia to Britain in March, said she would consider joining the action.

The 26-year-old said from her Sydney home yesterday that she spent three months in hospital recovering after being left unable to walk and unable to use her short-term memory.

She gained the use of her legs again and has recently recovered the use of her left eye and ear, but her memory still often falters.

"It was the worst time of my life. I'll talk to [my partner] Paul [Lucas] to see what options there are."

She said there were no warnings of the dangers on her flight, and she would have acted differently had she been alerted to how serious the problem was.

Air NZ told the Herald on November 26 that it would add new advice to its inflight video about blood clots, urging passengers to take regular exercise during long flights.

That same day, English Lords released a report that said being cramped in a plane seat for a long time could indeed trigger a clot, and that it could be fatal weeks later.

Gordon and Slater said it had been contacted by one man on behalf of his brother, whose wife died from a clot in September as she tried to climb off a plane.

Another woman had spent most of her holiday in a London hospital bed three weeks ago after getting leg cramps on her flight. They were caused by leg clots that spread to her lungs.

A Melbourne man, aged 49, will sue for a blood clot formed in his left lung after a flight from Ireland.