Well, guys, let's wait and see what happens next. It looks to me as if Lufthansa is exposed to serious liability under US law with this one, but what do I know? I am sure that a plaintiff could do a deal with even the greediest lawyer that guaranteed a minimum payout after the lawyer's cut that exceeded $160,000, freeing the lawyer to take a swing at one very large piñata.
Yes, ATC Watcher, I know about those secrecy laws. No way to do an end-run around them, none at all? There you have a guy who was very obviously hiding an extremely dangerous condition and thereby posing an unacceptable risk to innocent people. There was nobody sending him to a gas chamber or even a camp then.
He had multiple prescriptions for medications that were illegal to use while flying, didn't he? Some guy comes into your practice to get that kind of stuff and you don't bother to ask about his background, perhaps to check if Lubitz, Andreas Günter shows up on the LBA database as an airline pilot? There you get into a different sort of German mindset, that "This was not my job," that "I build the rockets to go up in the air; where they come down is not my affair."
You know about the German government itself buying stolen bank account data from Switzerland, data that violated strict Swiss banking secrecy laws, I assume. How odd that there was no "But, but, that's illegal!" in that case. Catching German tax evaders is different from keeping 149 people away from dying screaming, so that it's okay to bend some Swiss rules chasing German tax cheats.
Last edited by chuks; 14th Apr 2016 at 20:19.