121,000 air passenger claims: German courts rule with AI help

German courts have turned into claim factories for air passengers. In 2025, one local court alone, Amtsgericht Königs Wusterhausen, which covers BER airport, received 19,146 lawsuits. 92 percent of them were about air passenger rights, not other areas of civil law.

If the court sat 365 days a year, it would have to hear about 50 of these cases a day. So it leans on artificial intelligence. KAI, a chatbot built for Königs Wusterhausen, helps it rule.

The scale is not a Berlin story alone. Figures cited by F.A.Z. show that around 121,000 air passenger claims were filed across Germany last year. Courts are deciding mass, highly repetitive cases. The dispute usually concerns compensation of a few hundred to a thousand euros.

Such cases rarely turn on whether a flight was late. The fight is mainly about whether the delay stemmed from extraordinary circumstances that release the carrier from paying compensation.

How much you can recover

The amount depends on the length of the route and ranges from 250 to 600 euros per leg. The trouble starts earlier, at the airport. F.A.Z. describes passengers flying from Berlin to Amsterdam who only learned about their connection on arrival. At the information desk they were told that to be rebooked they first had to actually miss the connecting flight; rebooking in advance is not possible. Some travellers got stuck at various airports and only then pursued their rights.

The scale grows with air traffic. In 2026, airlines are expected to carry 5,085,000,000 passengers, 118,000,000 more than a year earlier. Every cancelled or heavily delayed flight is a potential claim.

Trains run late too

For comparison, German rail recorded 58.7 percent of long-distance trains on time in the first half of 2026, and cancellations are not counted in that figure. Eight percent of long-distance trains were cancelled entirely or in part, three percentage points more than a year earlier. Only 3.6 percent of services were cancelled without any replacement connection.

In both aviation and rail, a passenger in the European Union can claim compensation for major delays and cancellations, though the thresholds and amounts differ between the two. The number of lawsuits shows, however, that the law itself is one thing, and enforcing it can be a separate journey.