Clearing clouds of uncertainty—a principled approach to determining what qualifies as an ‘accident’ under the Montreal Convention
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The revival of international air travel in the wake of the receding COVID-19 pandemic has refocused the spotlight on the inherent hazards of carriage by air. From a legal perspective, the focal issue is whether any of those air travel-related incidents that may result in passenger death or bodily injury are compensable accidents. This article examines the meaning and scope of the term ‘accident’ under Article 17(1) of the 1999 Montreal Convention (MC99)—the exclusive regime for air carrier liability within international air transportation. The term ‘accident’ is a condition precedent to air carrier liability but has been left undefined by the drafters of MC99, leaving it to national courts to interpret its meaning. Accordingly, the article utilizes a doctrinal and normative methodology to review a select body of case law drawn primarily from common law jurisdictions. It proceeds to identify a set of ten principles that would guide future courts to ascertain whether an alleged event qualifies as an ‘accident’ consistently and predictably. The article also discusses the controversial interpretation of ‘accident’ by the Court of Justice of the European Union, signaling judicial discord, and sheds light on the consequent implications, especially in regard to MC99’s pursuit of global uniformity and achieving a fair balance of interests between passengers and air carriers.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it