KAL Flight 007 Families: $50M Punitive Verdict, Then Individual Recoveries Totaling More Than $26M

On the night of September 1, 1983, Korean Air Lines Flight 007 strayed more than 300 miles off its intended course and entered Soviet airspace over Sakhalin Island. A Soviet military aircraft shot it down over the Sea of Japan. All 269 passengers and crew aboard the Boeing 747 were killed. No bodies were recovered.

Charles Herrmann, then building his Seattle-area practice, took on the representation of dozens of families of the victims. The cases were transferred to Chief Judge Aubrey E. Robinson, Jr. in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, where the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation had consolidated all domestic KAL 007 claims for a joint trial on liability.

The central legal question was whether KAL's flight crew had engaged in 'wilful misconduct' within the meaning of the Warsaw Convention of 1929, the international treaty then governing liability in cross-border aviation disasters. A finding of willful misconduct would lift the Convention's $75,000-per-family damages cap. Herrmann worked to establish that the pilots had knowingly deviated from the filed flight plan and had failed to correct course even when they had reason to suspect the plane was off track. After securing the testimony of another KAL 747 captain, whose account Herrmann described as cracking open the case, the jury returned a verdict of willful misconduct in 1989 and awarded $50 million in punitive damages to be divided among the roughly 100 families still pursuing claims.

The punitive award did not survive appellate review. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld the willful-misconduct finding but vacated the punitive damages, ruling that the Warsaw Convention does not permit punitive recovery as a matter of law. The U.S. Supreme Court later addressed related damages questions in Zicherman v. Korean Air Lines (1996), holding that the Death on the High Seas Act governed compensatory claims and limited recovery to pecuniary loss only.

Despite the appellate cutbacks, the willful-misconduct finding was preserved, and Herrmann ultimately secured individual recoveries for his clients. By the firm's account, it recovered more than $26 million in total for the families it represented, including $10 million for a single family. Herrmann's role in the litigation was portrayed in the HBO film 'Tailspin' and documented in the book 'Death of Flight 007.'