Following up on our item of last May 12: the Eighth Circuit federal court of appeals ruled last year that the safety rating group ARGUS (Aviation Research Group) had not defamed Aviation Charter Inc. in 2001 by assigning the charter operator its lowest safety rating, “DNQ” or “Does Not Qualify”. Aviation Charter Inc. operated the plane whose crash a year later, in 2002, killed Sen. Paul Wellstone of Minnesota and seven others. The Eighth Circuit affirmed a lower court’s decision to dismiss the suit, saying ARGUS’s comparative ratings involved subjective interpretations of data and were not “sufficiently factual to be susceptible of being proved true or false”. So for now, at least, it seems that if you want to rate air carriers’ safety, go ahead and rate away. (“Court decisions: Air carrier’s poor safety rating isn’t defamatory”, National Law Journal, Aug. 1, 2005, not online).
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