The airline trained staff and ran annual checks - a court still found that wasn't enough
An airline trained its cabin crew and checked them yearly. A court still ordered it to pay $602,000 over one routine task.
On June 18, 2026, the Supreme Court of Queensland ordered Alliance Airlines to pay $602,068.02 to a former flight attendant and cabin manager who injured her back pulling a catering cart from its galley slot before takeoff.
It was a task she had done many times before. Before an originating flight, crew were required to pull each cart out of its bay to check inside and behind it for weapons or devices. The catch was the space. The stowage bay was only 88 centimetres wide, and a full cart ran 81 centimetres long - leaving almost no room to stand square behind it. Crew tended to pull from the side, in a twisted stance.
On April 15, 2020, one cart would not budge. The worker pulled harder, then applied what she called "maximum force." The cart released suddenly, and she felt immediate pain in her lower back. The injury, diagnosed as a back strain or musculoligamentous injury to the lumbar spine, never fully resolved, and she could no longer work as a flight attendant.
The court found the likely cause was the wheels of neighbouring carts overlapping and jamming in the cramped bay - a foreseeable problem, not a faulty cart.
Alliance argued its general manual-handling training was sufficient and that jammed carts were rare. The court rejected that. It found the airline gave no specific guidance on the safe way to pull a cart from stowage, despite offering task-specific advice for other cart work, such as serving passengers.
More striking was the finding about what happened after training. Staff were sent an online "Manual Handling Awareness" module, which the court described as purely generic - illustrated with a cartoon of a construction worker on a jackhammer. Meanwhile, the airline's annual on-board checks observed crew for service performance, not for whether they were lifting and pulling safely.
That gap decided the case. The court held that an employer's duty to provide a safe system of work does not stop at induction. Training fades, and habits drift. Reasonable care, the court found, called for regular monitoring and correction of how staff actually performed common manual tasks. Alliance already had a training program and a checking system in place; the court found the burden of extending the check to cover safe manual handling would have been light.
The court found no contributory negligence, describing the off-centre pull as a natural response to a confined space that the worker had never been warned against.
For HR and safety leaders, the signal is direct. Under an employer's duty of care, a safe system of work is a continuing obligation, not a one-off event. Induction training and a generic annual e-learning module may not discharge the duty on their own where a common, identifiable task carries a foreseeable injury risk. Courts will look at whether the way people actually do the job is being monitored, and corrected when it slips.
The worker sought about $800,000. The court awarded $602,068.02, with costs to be decided separately if the parties cannot agree.
