Two More Passengers Sue Frontier Over 2024 Fiery Las Vegas Landing

The short version: Two more passengers have sued Frontier Airlines over the fiery emergency landing of Flight 1326 at Harry Reid International Airport on October 5, 2024. Janneth Dominguez and Martin Torres, both Clark County residents, filed suit Friday in Nevada District Court alleging negligence, claiming the crew knew the cabin was filling with smoke and heat but kept passengers aboard for nearly an hour after landing. The suit disputes the NTSB's finding that none of the 197 people aboard were injured. Frontier did not comment.

Two years after a Frontier Airlines jet touched down in Las Vegas with its landing gear on fire, the lawsuits are still coming.

Janneth Dominguez and Martin Torres, both Clark County residents who were aboard Flight 1326 from San Diego on October 5, 2024, filed a lawsuit on Friday, October 2, in Nevada District Court against the airline, alleging negligence and demanding a jury trial. They are the latest in a growing line of passengers to take Frontier to court over a landing that made headlines around the world when video showed flames and smoke pouring from the Airbus A321's main landing gear as it rolled to a halt.

What the new suit alleges

According to the complaint, the trouble started during the descent into Las Vegas, when the crew identified a chemical smell of unidentified origin and detected dense smoke filling the cabin — an odor the suit describes as smelling like burning rubber and petroleum products. The flight crew and pilots put on oxygen masks, the complaint says, but no masks were deployed in the cabin for the passengers.

As the dense smoke filled the cabin, it became "extraordinarily hot," the suit alleges, and passengers were further traumatized as they watched emergency vehicles assembling on the runway below. On touchdown, the auto brakes and anti-skid systems failed, the tires exploded, and "fire was observed pouring from the plane."

Then came the part of the story that has fueled every lawsuit since: the passengers were not evacuated for nearly an hour after the landing. The complaint alleges Frontier "failed to properly repair, inspect, and/or maintain the aircraft in a reasonably safe condition," and invokes the doctrine of res ipsa loquitur — the legal principle that some accidents are, by their nature, evidence of negligence.

The article reporting the filing does not name the plaintiffs' attorney and does not state a dollar amount of damages claimed.

The flight that made the news

Flight 1326 was minutes from landing after an otherwise routine trip from San Diego when the cabin crew first noticed a chemical-like odor. The flight attendants alerted the pilots, who soon smelled it in the cockpit too, donned their oxygen masks, and declared an emergency. Following emergency procedures, the crew put the aircraft into an electrical emergency configuration — cutting power to systems including the flight data recorder, which stopped recording about nine minutes before landing.

The landing itself was captured on video by witnesses on the ground: flames shooting from the right main landing gear, a trail of smoke as the jet tried to halt. All 197 passengers and crew got off the plane. What happened in the interval between touchdown and evacuation — nearly an hour, in a smoke-filled, sweltering cabin — is the core of every legal claim that has followed.

What the NTSB found — and what the suit disputes

The National Transportation Safety Board's preliminary report traced the incident to a brake fire caused by a fault in the fan unit that cools the avionics compartment. The resulting damage, the NTSB said, was limited to the landing gear, wheels, tires, and brakes — not classified as substantial. Critically, the NTSB report stated that none of the 197 passengers and crew were injured.

The new lawsuit disputes that directly. Like the suits before it, it claims the passengers suffered trauma, distress, and physical effects from the landing and the prolonged time aboard the aircraft afterward — injuries the NTSB's preliminary accounting did not capture.

That tension — between an official finding of "no injuries" and passengers' claims of lasting harm — is now a question for the courts. Preliminary NTSB reports are factual snapshots, not final determinations of who was hurt or who is liable, and they are generally inadmissible as evidence of liability in civil trials. The jury, if the case gets there, will hear the passengers' account firsthand.

A growing docket

Dominguez and Torres are not the first to sue. An earlier lawsuit by several passengers, filed in October 2024, is pending in U.S. District Court. A separate suit by Clark County resident Alphonso Gibbs, filed in Clark County District Court, alleges neck and back injuries from what it describes as an "abnormally hard landing."

Each new filing keeps the incident in litigation two years after the fire was put out — and each one asks the same basic question: when a plane lands in flames and the passengers sit in the smoke for the better part of an hour, who answers for what happened next?

Frontier did not comment on the new lawsuit.

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