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The Supreme Court of Queensland has held a regional airline liable for a flight attendant’s injury to her back after she pulled a resistant catering cart from stowage during a pre-flight security check.
Kirstie Hunter had worked for Alliance Airlines since 2012 and had been a cabin manager since 2013. In April 2020, she was working on an Alliance Fokker 100 aircraft due to fly from Cairns to Townsville.
Alliance’s security protocol required cabin crew to inspect inside and behind each catering cart before an originating flight, which meant removing the carts from their galley bays.
The particular galley had facing cart stowage units, leaving an 88 cm corridor between. The long side of a cart was 81 cm such that as it began to emerge, a crew member could not practically remain directly in front of it and would naturally be inclined to work from one side.
Kirstie’s first cart moved without difficulty. The second, middle cart did not.
She released its brake and pulled it from an off-centre position. After several increasingly forceful attempts, the cart suddenly came free and she immediately felt severe lower-back pain.
In the subsequent injury compensation claim, there was no dispute that the pulling-and-twisting movement caused a back strain or musculoligamentous injury to the cabin manager’s lumbar spine.
The court accepted that she could not return to flight-attendant work and that the build-up of pain limited her to part-time sedentary work, rather than the full-time capacity for which Alliance contended.
Justice Jim Henry inferred that the resistance was probably temporary wheel overlap between neighbouring carts in the tightly confined stowage area, rather than a defect in the cart itself.
Kirstie conceded that the airline was not required to eliminate every instance of cart resistance. Rather, her case focused on what crew were taught to do when resistance was encountered.
In response, Alliance argued that the problem was too rare to require further instruction, pointing to general manual-handling training and procedures for tagging faulty equipment out of service.
Justice Henry rejected that approach.
Alliance’s own documentation recognised that posture mattered when pulling a cart from stowage, but its training and operations manual did not give a specific method for doing the task safely.
Nor was the tag-out procedure a realistic answer: resistance while undertaking a mandatory security check did not necessarily mean the cart was faulty and leaving it in place would leave the check incomplete.
The court held that the risk was foreseeable and not insignificant.
In a constrained space, it was a predictable human response for a flight attendant to pull harder when a cart resisted movement, and to do so from an off-centre position.
The fact that Alliance had no record of a previous back injury from this task did not answer the objective question of whether the risk should have been anticipated.
The precautions identified by the court were comparatively modest: train crew to begin from a front-on position with the back naturally aligned, use the legs and whole body, seek assistance if significant resistance occurs, and maintain monitoring and review to ensure the method is used.
Alliance already had a training program and onboard checking system. In the court’s view, adding this focused guidance and supervision would have imposed a low burden.
Proof of causation followed from those findings. Had Kirstie been trained in the safer method, it was unlikely she would have been injured.
The court also rejected Alliance’s contributory-negligence argument. Her response to the resistant cart was natural in the circumstances and did not contradict any specific instruction she had been given.
The damages assessment reflected both the enduring impact of the injury and her remaining capacity. General damages were assessed at $14,690. Past economic loss, including superannuation, was $244,000 while future economic loss was assessed at $360,000 after a 35 per cent contingency discount.
The total assessment excluding the WorkCover refund of $70,000 refund came in at just over $600,000.
Hunter v Alliance Airlines [2026] QSC 140 Henry J, 18 June 2026
Categories: aircraft accident