The Supreme Court of Queensland in Cairns awarded a flight attendant in excess of $600,000 in compensation for a back injury which she suffered at work. The injury occurred when she had to pull with significant force a catering cart which was not moving freely from its stowed position. The plaintiff brought a common law damages claim against her employer, claiming that the employer was negligent and failed to provide a safe system of work.

Facts

The plaintiff was employed by Alliance Airlines as a flight attendant. She started working there in 2012. Her injury occurred some 8 years later in 2020.

It was part of the plaintiff’s duties to perform security checks before each flight, including checking behind the catering carts to make sure there were no concealed weapons.

It was very difficult to move the catering carts from their stowed position. There were a number of reasons for this. Firstly, the carts were stowed very close to each other and the space between them was very limited. This meant that the swivel wheels of the carts could protrude beyond the sides of the carts and overlap with the wheels of a neighbouring cart, creating a resistance to movement. Another issue was that a full-sized cart was 81 centimetres long, but the corridor in front of the carts was only 88 centimetres wide. It would have been very difficult to stand in front of the cart and pull it out because of the lack of space. Rather, flight attendants would inevitably have to move to the side of the carts and pull them from an off-centre position.

The plaintiff’s case was that in order to carry out her duties, on this particular occasion she had to apply significant force from an off-centre position to move the cart forward.

The Court considered the available evidence very carefully, including the carts, the swivel wheels as well as the physical configuration of the cart stowage units. It found that it was reasonably foreseeable that flight attendants would be required to apply significant force from a sideways position to move the carts forward, and in doing so they were at risk of suffering musculoskeletal injury.

Unsafe system of work

The Court considered in detail the theoretical and practical training which Alliance Airlines provided to its flight attendants. This included ground training, in-flight training, online modules and so on.

Ultimately the Court found that the training did not include any specific advice about the safe method of pulling a cart out from its stowed position. The Court stated that the plaintiff was not trained to stand in front of the cart and pull it directly towards her to initiate a movement.

The Court found that there were obvious precautions available to Alliance Airlines which it should have taken to minimise or eliminate the risk of injury. These included:

1. Training flight attendants to position themselves in a front-on position with the back in its natural alignment, using the full force of the body, including the legs, and to seek assistance from another flight attendant in the task if significant resistance is encountered.
2. Maintaining a system of monitoring and review so as to ensure flight attendants did those things when performing that task.

Mild injury leads to significant damages

An interesting feature of this case is that the plaintiff was diagnosed with lower back strain “only”. That is, there was no bulge, and no surgery was required. Indeed, the Court noted that the injury which the plaintiff suffered was of a kind that many people substantially recover from.

The critical point to note though is that even though many people recover from such injury, the plaintiff has not. She has continued to experience significant pain and incapacity, which has had a profound impact on her earning capacity.

As usual in personal injury matters, the biggest component of the damages award is for loss of earning capacity (both for the period before the trial as well as for loss of future earning capacity). In this case the loss of earning capacity meant that the plaintiff was no longer able to work in a physically demanding role on a full-time basis, but instead, she is now left with having to find sedentary employment on a part-time basis. The Court compared the plaintiff’s pre-incident earning capacity with her current earning capacity, and this calculation resulted in an award of just over $600,000 with respect to loss of earning capacity.

Greater than usual deduction for vicissitudes of life

In a personal injury claim once the Court calculates an injured person’s loss of future earning capacity (future economic loss) the Court then applies a discount to take into account that people sometimes cannot work due to circumstances beyond their control (illness, family issues and so on). The usual discount is around 10% to 15%. In this case, the Court discounted the plaintiff’s future economic loss award by 35%.

In dollar terms, this meant that instead of awarding the plaintiff around $470,000 in future economic loss (based on a 15% discount) the Court only awarded some $360,000. Obviously, this is a very significant discount.

The reason the Court applied a higher discount is because it considered that if a relatively mild injury caused the plaintiff such disability, then there was a chance that even if the incident had not occurred, sometime in the future an event may have happened causing a similar injury and similar disability. Secondly, the Court also considered that there were further treatment options available to the plaintiff to improve her medical condition which she was not able to take advantage of before trial. The Court considered that after trial, with the benefit of the damages amount, the plaintiff could afford further treatment which may well improve her condition.

Obligation to mitigate loss

The defendant tried to argue that the damages award should be less because the plaintiff failed to mitigate her loss.

Generally, there is an obligation on injured people to mitigate their loss after an injury. For example, if you can no longer work full-time in your normal occupation but you can still work part-time somewhere else, you would generally be expected to try part-time work.

In this case, the plaintiff tried to start her own business. The defendant’s argument was that instead of starting her own business, the plaintiff should have engaged in part-time work as an employee, in which case she would have earned a higher income than what her business generated.

The Court held that just because a defendant can suggest that a plaintiff could have engaged in more beneficial conduct will not in itself mean that the plaintiff failed to mitigate their loss. However, the Court did accept that in this case there came a point where the plaintiff should have realised that her business was not generating money. At that point the reasonable action would have been to engage in some other part-time work as an employee. The court took this into account when calculating the appropriate damages amount.

Read the full case here (Hunter v Alliance Airlines [2026] QSC 140)