Bibliographic record
Abstract
I. INTRODUCTION There have been several recent issues and legislative developments affecting recovery for injuries and deaths suffered on international flights. This paper will briefly address two areas: Death on the High Seas Act (DOHSA)1 and The Convention for the Unification of Certain Rules for International Carriage by Air.2 The discussion on DOHSA focuses on application of DOHSA to accidents on or near oil platforms and will also address the 2000 amendment to DOHSA and applicable case law following this amendment. There have been some interesting decisions lately applying the Warsaw Convention. The Montreal Convention of 19993 will, if ratified, certainly have an impact on litigation arising out of injuries or deaths occurring on international flights. II. OUTER CONTINENTAL SHELF LANDS ACT VERSUS DEATH ON THE HIGH SEAS ACT The Death on the High Seas Act was enacted in 1920 to provide a remedy to families who lost loved ones at sea. DOHSA has been the source of much litigation, particularly with respect to the application of DOHSA to aviation accidents. An interesting issue presented itself recently - whether DOHSA or the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA)4 provided the applicable damages regime when a helicopter ferrying workers attempted to land on an oil platform on the Outer Continental Shelf but crashed into the platform and fell into the water. Williamson v. Petroleum Helicopters, Inc.5 and Brown v. Eurocopter., S.A.6 were wrongful death actions filed in the U.S. District Court, Southern District of Texas (Galveston Division) arising out of a helicopter crash which occurred on November 28, 1996, near an oil platform about twenty-five miles southeast of Galveston in the Gulf of Mexico. The helicopter was flying passengers to and from oil platforms in the Gulf. While en route to one of the platforms, the helicopter experienced severe vibrations and also loss of tail rotor control. The pilot attempted to make an emergency landing at the nearest oil platform. During this attempt, the helicopter collided with the oil platform and then plunged into the sea, killing the pilot and the two passengers. In both cases, the plaintiffs argued that OCSLA applies when injury occurs when a helicopter crashes onto a platform on the Outer Continental Shelf.7 Under OCSLA, a platform is the same as being on land.8 If OCSLA applied, then the law of the adjacent state (which in this case would be Texas) would govern, and the plaintiffs' possible recoverable damages would be much greater than under DOHSA. A. OCSLA and DOHSA in Williamson and Brown The initial action, Williamson v. Petroleum Helicopters, Inc., was brought in 1997 by the surviving relatives of the passengers killed in the crash.9 The plaintiffs brought their claims for wrongful death under OCSLA,10 and their claim for damages included a claim for nonpecuniary damages - loss of society, loss of consortium, and decedents' pre-death pain and suffering as well as punitive damages. In response, the defendants, Eurocopter, S.A. and Petroleum Helicopters, Inc., moved for partial summary judgment arguing that DOHSA was the exclusive remedy in this case and that OCSLA was inapplicable. Therefore, the plaintiffs could not recover punitive or nonpecuniary damages. The court held that DOHSA is the exclusive remedy when a helicopter ferrying passengers crashes on the high seas.11 In granting defendants' motion for partial summary judgment, Judge Kent followed the Fifth Circuit and applied maritime law. He examined whether there existed an independent basis for admiralty jurisdiction. Such an analysis requires that the claim have a maritime locality and a connection to maritime activity. Judge Kent found that the locality requirement was satisfied because the problems in the aircraft manifested over the Gulf of Mexico.12 Judge Kent further found that the use of helicopters in ferrying personnel to and from oil platforms demonstrated the necessary maritime relationship. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".