The Lawyers’ Assistance Act

Under the 1996 Aviation Disaster Assistance Act, airlines must inform survivors and victims that the American Red Cross will provide care and crisis assistance when there's a crash involving deaths.

But there's no law requiring airlines to offer post-flight help or counseling to passengers involved in traumatic incidents related to turbulence, near misses or even spectacles of bad behavior.

Instead, critics say, airline personnel ignore passengers' psychological needs after such incidents, concentrating instead on re-bookings, collecting baggage information and issuing meal or travel vouchers.

"The emotional and psychological needs of fliers traumatized in harrowing incidents have been neglected far too long," Gail Dunham, executive director of the National Air Disaster Alliance Foundation, told USA Today this week. "Airlines and the government should be required to provide assistance and help them recover."

Her solution? Ms. Dunham wants the 1996 law broadened to assist fliers who say they've been traumatized by harrowing incidents even when no death or injury has resulted.

Should airlines also be responsible to hold our hands and help us recover from the psychological shock of discovering that people in foreign lands may not share our standards of safety, sanitation and personal hygiene? That the world out there abounds in bumpy roads, bad water and thoughtless or even larcenous baggage handlers?

Does no one remember that a mere few generations ago, travel meant routinely risking hunger, thirst, disease, shipwreck, attacks by hostile natives and inadequate laundry facilities?

"If the family assistance act was expanded to folks on airplanes that have non-fatal accidents, it would need to be renamed the Lawyers' Assistance Act," said aviation consultant Michael Boyd. "It would be a field day for airplane chasers trying to prove their clients had severe mental strain."

Thus, presumably, driving up the cost of air fares to cover the new costs of airlines targeted in a new "lawsuit lottery."

This is not a good idea.