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Ruling: Airline owed only hundreds of dollars for cable cut

PHOENIX – The Arizona Supreme Court says an airline is entitled to recover only hundreds of dollars for an hours-long telecommunications outage caused by the cutting of a fiber optic cable that wasn’t properly marked at a Tempe construction site.

The 2009 outage shut down US Airways’ reservation system and affected 1,360 flights, and the airline said it suffered $2 million of economic losses.

However, the state high court’s two-paragraph ruling Wednesday on an appeal lets stand lower courts’ rulings that the airline can recover only $586 from Qwest Corp. because of the telecommunications utility’s tariff provisions.

Since the outage, US Airways has merged American Airlines and Qwest has merged with CenturyLink.

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