Sheer fright seen as lawsuit claim for Southwest survivors

Being on an airplane more than six miles in the air when an engine blows up and sends shrapnel through a window is an experience so scary that aviation lawyers say it’s not just the family of the woman killed on a Southwest flight this week who could have a case. “All of the passengers here, and the crew, will likely have claims,” said Robert Clifford, founder of Chicago-based Clifford Law Offices, who’s been involved in every domestic commercial aviation disaster since the 1970s. “Even if these people were not physically injured,” he said, “many, many of them will experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.” The people who were sending “videos to their families, saying, ‘These are my last words to you,’ which is something that did occur in this incident, that kind of person will live with that for the rest of their life,” he said. The NTSB said it will take at least a year to pinpoint what caused the engine failure that led to the first fatality on a US-registered airline in more than nine years. In the meantime, several experts with knowledge of commercial airline disasters said that Southwest will likely lead the charge to work with passengers and their families.<br/>