Colorado: Death Benefits Awarded in Spite of Traveling Employee's Intoxication

An airline pilot's "deviation" ceased when he and a colleague stopped drinking and retired to the colleague's hotel room--the pilot was so inebriated that he could not find his own hotel--held a Colorado appellate court. Accordingly, when the pilot sustained fatal injuries when he was struck by an auto outside the colleague's hotel, his injuries were compensable under Colorado's traveling employee rule. That his blood alcohol level was twice the legal limit did not mean he was engaged in a disqualifying deviation from his employment.

Thomas A. Robinson, J.D., the Feature National Columnist for the LexisNexis Workers’ Compensation eNewsletter, is co-author of Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law (LexisNexis).

LexisNexis Online Subscribers: Citations below link to Lexis Advance.

See SkyWest Airlines. v. Industrial Claim Appeals Office, 2020 COA 131, 2020 Colo. App. LEXIS 1508 (Aug. 27, 2020)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 25.01.

Source: Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, the nation’s leading authority on workers’ compensation law

For a more detailed discussion of the case, see

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