Delta Air Lines, Spirit Airlines and dozens of other airlines face nearly 40 class actions over their alleged failure to refund passengers amid the COVID-19 pandemic—and now, one plaintiffs lawyer wants them coordinated into multidistrict litigation.

Nicholas Coulson, of Liddle & Dubin in Detroit, who claims to be involved in 12 of the cases, filed a motion before the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation to coordinate the cases in Illinois or, as alternatives, Georgia or Florida. Coulson's motion, filed Tuesday, seeks to coordinate 38 cases 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, with others involving lawsuits against insurance firms over business interruption claims, against banks over their handling of COVID-19 relief loans to small businesses and against StubHub and others over unrefunded tickets.

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 who is chairman of the aviation and aerospace practice at Wilson Elser, for Frontier Airlines. Airline veteran Roy Goldberg, a partner at Stinson in Washington, D.C., has stepped in for JetBlue and Southwest.

This week's motion cites the U.S. Department of Transportation's April 3 order stating that airlines must refund customers after canceling their flights because of COVID-19. The motion says the cases allege breach of contract, which the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 does not preempt, and are likely to increase in number.

Coulson is seeking an MDL in the Northern District of Illinois, where the first cases filed, against United Airlines, are now before U.S. District Judge Thomas Durkin. Other options, he wrote, are the Northern District of Georgia, headquarters to Delta, the airline with the world's largest revenues, or the Southern District of Florida, home to Spirit Airlines, which faces more lawsuits than any other airline. He suggested U.S. District Judge Roy Altman of the Southern District of Florida and U.S. District Judge Eleanor Ross of the Northern District of Georgia.

The motion cites other MDLs that have been based on industries, such as banks in the overdraft checking account litigation and pharmaceutical manufacturers and distributors in the opioid crisis, in support of coordinating the cases against the airline industry.

"Here, 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.