Pursuing an action directly against a pilot is problematic if it is public transport work.
Any pilot flying an aircraft for public transport use is flying under approvals from an Operator, it would therefore be easier to pursue a claim against the Operator who issued that approval, for three reasons:
-they have a duty of care towards any passengers,
-they issued the Pilots approval, so he/she must obviously have been competent to hold said approval, and
-lastly they will have a bigger liability insurance pot which to can sue against.
To get to the pilot you would need to prove negligence against the pilot, which is not an easy matter!
As a rule of thumb, a pilot would need to carry out an act of gross negligence to have a claim made against him, I do say as a rule of thumb!
Claims against Pilots use to be threatened often because there use to be a limitation of liability against aircraft accidents, a good example of this was the Harding accident with the AS355 that crashed.
Due to the limitation of liability under the Warsaw convention the payout to Mr. Hardings widow was a modest few tens of thousand of pounds against a primary earner who made millions, the family tried to argue the section 22 exception in the Warsaw convention that the Pilot acted negligently thus opting out from the limitation of liability, this failed.
Secondly they tried to argue that the flight was not governed by the limitations of the Warsaw convention as Mr. Harding was flying for the purposes of work, and not under his own agreement as a passenger, again this failed.
The limitation to liability does not exist anymore since the MAP5 agreement was ratified, however the Warsaw section 17 de facto assumption that an Operator is responsible for any bodily harm that occurs to a passenger on a flight, or through a quirk in the original French version of the convention, is sitting in the boarding lounge with the intention of going flying, is still very much a current piece of legislation.
Additionally, the Warsaw convention was ratified in 1929, and is superior to European Union law, the Treaty of Rome that established the EEC clearly states in article 301 that any international treaty signed before 1st January 1958 is superior to European law.
In summary, it's a pig and expensive to sue a pilot unless he's been a real pillock!
Miles