Personal responsibility doesnt exist anymore. Thats one reason I like the skydiving community (not the one-timers, the hardcore guys). Skydivers never sue one another. I broke my back 6 years ago from a hard opening. I would never be able to prove it, but my suspicion is a packing error. Guess who got sued? NOBODY! Never even considered it.
If you think loading your family in a plane and then loading it 650 lbs overweight is acceptable, you may have gotten what you deserve.
This too, will go away eventually.
There was a local club that had volunteers working at a work party (not aviation or skydiving related) on a commercial location. Someone tripped and fell carrying something heavy they never should have lifted alone, on a small set of stairs (three steps) and broke their ankle.
They told the club they'd go to the hospital and get patched up and never sue. Not the club's fault.
Their insurance company demanded full details of the accident (location, activity, etc) before they would pay the medical claim. Person was honest and didn't lie, since they didn't want their claim to go unpaid for any clauses about lying to the insurer.
Insurer then spent plenty of time and money on lawyers and their administrative staff to find out who the club was, who the commercial site owner was, and involve all of them in a lengthy legal battle as well as forced the commercial sites to demand the non-profit clubs at their facilities now carry expensive liability insurance including a minimum medical claim capability, even though this type of work on site is at most, an annual thing, the work also includes clean up of the commercial location and the clubs do this for free, and has always been a symbiotic relationship benefitting all.
It almost got the commercial site owner's lawyers to outright ban all such club activities on these locations owned nationwide.
The only people who's lives were made better by the event were the lawyers on all sides. The clubs all bought the insurance and raised club dues. The commercial sites instituted heavy insurance requirements as well as nearly doubled their pieces for non-profits using their facilities to cover their additional insurance costs they also purchased. The guy's original underwriter ended up paying for his mistake as expected but also paid a phalanx of lawyers to do all of this work, so my assumption is they raised rates to their customers too, and the clubs decided on their own to stop doing volunteer work for the site owners to lower the overall risk to volunteers.
Lawyers have a way of destroying everything they touch, when used in this fashion. No offense to our lawyer friends here on the board, but it's my experience thus far. Absolutely nothing good came of the entire thing and a lot of people thought the process would mean the true end of the non-profit clubs involved. Volunteers who sit on the Boards of these organizations are often hanging their assets WAY out on a shaky limb when a volunteer gets hurt, even if it was the volunteer's fault and they admit it.
It's not the costs of covering the volunteers' medical expenses, since they all technically have medical coverage these days, or they're being fined by their own government for not carrying said coverage. It's about paying all the lawyers and staff at both the non-profits and the commercial site operator, for the "process".
Which ultimately led up to the same underwriter the accident started with, paying up. In the end it costs the insurer nothing, since they'll just raise rates to cover all the lawyer's time they allowed. And that was already "baked in" anyway. Their lawyers are salaried and/or on retainer. They probably have a "use them, we're paying them anyway" mentality toward these things.
