U.S. District Judge Roy Altman

Spirit Airlines, Delta Air Lines and dozens of other carriers are facing nearly 40 class actions claiming they failed to pay refunds to canceled passengers in the COVID-19 pandemic, and at least one plaintiffs lawyer wants all of the cases to be coordinated into multidistrict litigation.

Nicholas Coulson of Liddle & Dubin in Detroit, who is involved in 12 cases, filed a motion with the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation, asking to coordinate the cases in Florida, Georgia or Illinois the motion seeks to consolidate 38 cases in 16 district courts involving 21 domestic and foreign airlines.

"As alleged in the actions, the defendant airlines have each refused to honor the refund obligations imposed on them by their own contractual agreements and federal law," Coulson wrote. "Instead, they have offered their customers an unwanted raincheck, functionally taking an interest-free bridge loan (which in many cases will never be repaid before the voucher expires) from their customers in addition to the billions of taxpayer dollars provided in the form of federal bailouts. As a result, passengers nationwide have been deprived of refunds to which they are entitled for flights that they did not take, in the midst of the greatest economic crisis in living memory."

The motion is the latest to ask the MDL panel to coordinate cases relating to the novel coronavirus pandemic. Others involve lawsuits against insurance firms over business interruption claim denials,  banks over their handling of COVID-19 relief loans to small businesses, and StubHub and others for tickets to canceled events.

Some firms have appeared for the airlines to defend against the refund cases, including David Balser at King & Spalding in Atlanta for Delta and William Katt, a Milwaukee partner and chairman of the aviation and aerospace practice at Wilson Elser for Frontier Airlines. Airline veteran Roy Goldberg, a partner at Stinson in Washington, has stepped in for JetBlue and Southwest Airlines.

The motion cites a U.S. Department of Transportation order issued April 3 saying airlines must refund customers after canceling flights due to COVID-19. The cases allege breach of contract, which the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 does not preempt, and are likely to increase in number.

Coulson would prefer an MDL in the Northern District of Illinois, where the first cases were filed against United Airlines, and assigned to U.S. District Judge Thomas Durkin.

But  he also suggested sending the cases to U.S. District Judge Roy Altman in the Southern District of Florida, home to Spirit Airlines, which faces more lawsuits than any other airline, or U.S. District Judge Eleanor Ross in the Northern District of Georgia, headquarters to Delta, the airline with the world's largest revenue.

Altman is a former Podhurst Orseck partner in Miami who specialized in aviation law and commercial litigation. His courtroom is in Fort Lauderdale.

The motion cites other MDLs driven by industries, such as banks in the Miami checking account overdraft litigation, and pharmaceutical manufacturers and distributors in the opioid crisis, in support of coordinating the cases against airlines.

"The salient factual core is the same in each case; the pandemic resulted in the cancellation of many flights, and the airlines failed to refund passengers for those flights," Coulson wrote.