You were hurt on a United, Delta or American flight, and before anything else about your claim can be answered, one factual question has to be: which company actually flew you. On all three of these airlines, often enough that it is the rule rather than the exception, the answer is not the name printed on your boarding pass.

The Name on the Ticket Is a Brand, Not Always an Airline

United Express, Delta Connection and American Eagle are marketing brands. The flights behind them are operated by separate airline companies with their own certificates, their own crews, their own maintenance programs, their own training departments and their own insurers. You book on united.com, you board at a United gate, the aircraft wears United colors, your boarding pass says United, and and a different corporation employed the crew who flew you.

The same three also sell foreign airlines' flying under their own codes. Through transatlantic and transpacific joint ventures, a flight with a mainline code and a mainline confirmation number is sometimes operated by a carrier from another country. More on that below, because it moves your claim into an entirely different body of law.

None of this is hidden, exactly. It sits on one line of your booking confirmation, the line that begins "operated by." It is just that nobody tells a passenger that line is the most legally consequential sentence in the document.

Where the Three Actually Differ

This is the part worth reading closely, because the three airlines are in genuinely different positions and it affects how hard it is to reach the company you thought you bought a ticket from.

Before the specifics, one caveat that matters: these arrangements move. Regional contracts are rebid, operators merge, and a brand's roster of partners this year is not its roster from three years ago. What follows is the shape of the thing rather than a current list, and the document that answers it for your flight is your booking confirmation.

United has operated without a wholly owned regional airline. United Express flying is done by separate regional companies rather than by United itself, among them SkyWest and Republic. United has held a minority shareholding in one of its regional operators, which matters to the argument but is not ownership in the sense that decides who employed the crew. On a United Express injury, the training, the maintenance release and the cabin procedures belong to another corporation, and whether United answers for them is a question to be argued rather than assumed.

Delta has owned its own regional carrier, Endeavor Air. Where a regional operator is a wholly owned subsidiary, that is the cleanest version of this relationship: the operator and the brand sit inside a single corporate family. Delta Connection flying is also done by contractors. So on Delta the answer is genuinely split, and which side of the split your flight falls on changes the case.

American has owned several of its regional airlines and contracted the rest. Envoy Air, PSA Airlines and Piedmont Airlines have operated as subsidiaries of American's parent, which puts a flight on one of them inside the family. Other American Eagle carriers fly under contract, and which companies hold those contracts shifts from year to year.

Now notice what all three have in common. The same regional airlines fly for more than one of them, and the mainlines have at times held minority stakes in the operators they contract with. A single regional airline can operate as United Express on Monday and Delta Connection on Tuesday in different paint, which means the company whose crew was working your flight may have no particular loyalty to the brand you believe you flew, and may be doing the same job for its competitor next week.

Why Ownership Changes Your Claim

An employer answers for what its employees do in the course of their work. That is the ordinary rule and it is why the owned-subsidiary cases are simpler: the crew worked for a company the mainline airline owns, and the corporate distance between the operator and the brand is short and well documented.

A company that hires an independent contractor is generally not responsible for the contractor's negligence, which is where the contracted-regional cases get interesting. The mainline airline's responsibility has to be built rather than assumed, usually out of how much control it exercised over the operation, what it required by contract, what it held itself out as providing to the passenger, and what the passenger was reasonably led to believe about who was flying them. That last point has real force when a passenger bought a ticket from one company, at that company's gate, on an aircraft in that company's livery.

The practical consequence is simple and expensive to get wrong: the defendant list is longer than one name, and identifying the right parties late can mean identifying them after your deadline has passed.

What injures passengers

Common Injuries, and Why the Aircraft You Were On Changes Them

On a domestic flight the carrier is held to the utmost care. What differs across these three brands is which aircraft you were actually on.

Overhead Bins on a Regional Jet

Regional bins will not take a standard carry-on, so bags are gate-checked by the dozen and forced into bins that never latch properly.

Gate-Checked Bags and Airstairs

Bags handed back on the ramp, carried down stairs in weather. Note jetway or airstairs, and wet or dry.

Hot Liquid and the Service Cart

Regional cabins are tighter, which leaves less room to get out of the way of a cart.

Turbulence

Whether the belt sign was on, what the crew announced, and whether carts were still out all matter.

Which Company Actually Flew You

Much of this flying is operated by a contracted regional airline. Naming the wrong company is the most common early mistake.

A Fall Inside the Terminal

Usually not the airline. A fall in the concourse is a claim against the airport, and a public entity can carry a much shorter deadline.

The Other Way the Name Misleads: Partner Metal

All three of these airlines run deep joint ventures with foreign carriers. Delta with Air France, KLM, Virgin Atlantic and Korean Air. United through Star Alliance partners. American through its oneworld joint businesses with British Airways, Iberia, Japan Airlines and Qantas.

The result is that a flight sold with a US carrier's code and confirmation number is sometimes operated by a foreign airline. If that describes your flight, your claim is against a foreign carrier on an international itinerary, and the Montreal Convention governs rather than California law. That means a different deadline, a specific treaty answer to where you can sue, and no parallel state claim at all. Send us the full itinerary and we can tell you which of the two frameworks yours falls under.

The same trap works in reverse on a purely domestic-looking leg. The treaty applies based on the whole ticketed itinerary, not the flight you were hurt on, so a Los Angeles to Dallas segment sold as the first piece of a trip to London is international carriage and the treaty governs that domestic leg too. If any part of your ticket crossed a border, the treaty analysis is the one you need.

If It Really Was a Domestic Mainline Flight

Then no treaty is involved and California law decides what the airline owed you, which is more than passengers expect.

An airline carrying passengers is a common carrier, and California holds common carriers to the utmost care and diligence rather than to ordinary reasonable care. Reasonable care is the standard for a stranger who rear-ends you at a light. It is not the standard for a company that strapped you into a seat and controlled every part of your environment for five hours. Under ordinary negligence the airline argues it behaved reasonably. Under the carrier standard, reasonable is not the test, and the gap between the two is frequently the whole case.

Passengers who learn their flight was not treaty-governed often read that as bad news. It usually is not. State law gives you a higher duty of care, no liability tiers to argue over, and none of the treaty's rules stripping out every remedy except compensatory damages.

Where You Sue, What They Will Argue, and How Long You Have

None of the three is a California company. All three operate here continuously, with major operations at Los Angeles and San Francisco, so a claim arising from a flight that departed from or arrived in California is heard in a California court. You are not going to Chicago, Atlanta or Fort Worth.

Expect federal preemption. The statute that deregulated the airline industry bars state law claims relating to an airline's rates, routes and services, and all three carriers raise it as a matter of routine. The courts covering California read services narrowly, so ordinary personal injury claims generally survive. How a claim is framed matters: an injury case anchored to a physical event survives, while a claim that reads as a grievance about how an airline runs its business invites the defense.

Your deadline is two years from the date of injury under California law for a domestic flight. On an international itinerary it is two years from the date of arrival under the treaty, which functions as a condition on the right to sue rather than an ordinary limitations period, so the arguments that sometimes rescue a late California claim generally will not rescue a late treaty claim. Work out which clock you are on before you plan around either, because they do not start on the same day.

Where We Are Not the Right Call

If what happened was your own medical event in flight rather than something external happening to you, this is a hard claim under either framework and you should hear that early rather than late. Cabin pressure, dry air and six hours in a seat are ordinary conditions of flight.

If a foreign partner operated your flight and you do not live in California, the right forum is probably not here and you want counsel where you are. If what you lost is a suitcase, the airline's own claims process is faster and cheaper than any lawyer. And if more than two years have passed since the flight, lead with that fact when you call anyone, because the answer may be that the claim is gone and you deserve to hear it in the first minute rather than after an intake interview.

What to Do This Week

One. Pull up the booking confirmation and read the operated-by line for the specific segment you were hurt on, not the itinerary summary. Write down the company it names.

Two. Check whether any part of that ticket crossed an international border, including a leg you never flew.

Three. Write down the physical facts while you still have them. Jetway or airstairs, wet or dry, which bin, which row, which crew member you told, and what they wrote down.

Four. Ask the airline in writing for the incident report number. Cabin crews file one within hours of anything happening, and it exists whether or not anyone mentioned it to you.

Five. See a physician now rather than when it worsens, and count two years from the date of injury.

If nobody has told you which company actually operated your flight, that is the first thing to establish, and it is not reasonable to expect a passenger to untangle a regional contract or a joint venture on their own. We evaluate these claims at no cost, and if the honest answer is that what happened to you does not support one, you will hear that in the first conversation.