A major airline has been handed an eye-watering £3 million fine for discriminating against Jewish passengers.
Lufthansa was given the largest fine ever imposed by the US Department of Transportation against an airline for civil rights violations.
The passengers were boarding a flight from New York to Frankfurt in May 2022 with a large number of them due to make a connection to Budapest.
But the airline denied boarding to 128 Jewish passengers who were travelling to the Hungarian capital to attend an annual commemorative event in honour of an Orthodox rabbi.
According to the Department of Transportation, most of them wore “distinctive garb typically worn by Orthodox Jewish men” and used the same travel agencies to book tickets.
They did not know each other and were not travelling together, but told investigators that they were treated as if they were “a single group”.
During the first flight, the captain alerted Lufthansa security that some passengers had failed to follow crew instructions requiring masks and barring gathering in aisles and other places on board.
The alert led to holds on tickets of more than 100 passengers which led to them being blocked from their connecting flight. The majority were rebooked onto flights the same day.
Passengers interviewed for the Department of Transportation investigation said they had not witnessed misbehaviour and Lufthansa later failed to identify any one passenger who had not followed the rules.
But in the consent order, Lufthansa said its staff was unable to single out passengers because “the infractions were so numerous, the misconduct continued for substantial portions of the flight and at different intervals and the passengers changed seats during the flight”.
Lufthansa said that it was agreeing to the payment to avoid litigation but denied discrimination, blaming the incident on “an unfortunate series of inaccurate communications”.
The airline reached an agreement with most passengers in 2022. But more than 40 complaints have been forwarded to the US Department of Transportation.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said: “No one should face discrimination when they travel, and today’s action sends a clear message to the airline industry that we are prepared to investigate and take action whenever passengers’ civil rights are violated.”
