WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court today let stand a ruling that could force airlines to pay a lot more to some passengers whose luggage was lost or damaged.

The court, without comment, rejected an appeal in which American Airlines sought to limit how much it may have to pay for five suitcases that disappeared, or arrived empty, during a family's 1995 trip from the District of Columbia to the Dominican Republic.

The nation's major air carriers told the justices that a federal appeals court ruling in the American Airlines case "will senselessly harm the airlines and raise the cost of air travel for their passengers."

At issue was a now-amended provision of the Warsaw Convention, a treaty on international air travel, that generally limited air carrier liability for lost or damaged luggage to $9.07 per pound.

The English-language translation of that provision listed various information to be contained on luggage receipts given to passengers. That information included the weight of each package checked with the airlines.

The treaty stated that a carrier's failure to provide for two other pieces of information "and" the piece of luggage's weight on the receipt disqualifies that carrier from liability limits.

The required listing of luggage weight on passenger receipts was dropped last year.

Fourteen members of the Cruz family from Silver Spring, Md., checked 28 bags with American at Washington's National Airport as they began a trip just before Christmas 1995 to attend a relative's wedding in the Dominican Republic. Four of the bags never arrived at the airport in Santo Domingo, and a fifth eventually arrived damaged and empty.

American Airlines initially refused to pay any compensation, and the Cruz family sued for $15,000 — the asserted value of the bags and their contents. A federal trial judge ruled that the $9.07-per-pound limit applied even though American had failed to record any weight for the lost luggage on the passengers' receipts.

American's policy is to assume that any lost piece of luggage weighed the allowable free maximum, usually 70 pounds.

The judge said the treaty's language meant that the liability limit applied if any of the three pieces of information were listed on a passenger's receipt. Listing all three pieces of information was not required, the judge ruled.

The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia reversed that ruling last October, and sent the Cruz family's case back to the judge to reconsider what compensation should be paid.

"Although we recognize that the district court's interpretation is linguistically possible, we do not think it is a reasonable construction" of the treaty's language, the appeals court ruled. "The convention obliges a carrier to comply with each of the three particulars."

American's Supreme Court appeal was supported in a friend-of-the-court brief submitted by the Air Transport Association of America, which represents all major domestic airlines and five foreign airlines.

The association told the court that, although 99.5 percent of all checked bags reach their intended destination without incident, more than 450,000 pieces of baggage are delayed, lost or stolen each year.

Because the disputed treaty language was changed in March 1999 and owners of lost or damaged luggage have two years to make a claim, the association said, "There is a risk that similar suits against other airlines, including foreign carriers, may be filed in districts across the country until March of 2001."

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