Missouri: Jury awards $48 million for victims of plane crash

By Correy Stephenson The Daily Record Newswire BOSTON, MA -- A Missouri jury awarded damages totaling $48 million to the families of five victims of a plane crash - $4 million each in compensatory damages and a total of $28 million in punitive damages divided among them. Eight people boarded a plane for a skydiving flight on July 29, 2006, but just moments after take-off an engine exploded. For less than a minute the plane skimmed the tops of trees until it crashed, resulting in the death of six people onboard. Representing four of the five families in a lawsuit against Doncasters, a London-based aircraft engine parts manufacturer, lead counsel Gary C. Robb argued that the defendant substituted a different metal alloy for the compressor turbine blade than was recommended by the engine manufacturer. "The people on board never had a chance," said Robb, a partner at Robb & Robb in St. Louis, Mo. Larry Kaplan of Kaplan, Massamillo & Andrews in Chicago, who represented the defendant, did not return a call requesting comment on the suit. Moments after the DeHavilland Twin Otter airplane took off from the Sullivan Regional Airport in Missouri, the right engine exploded. Those on board knew that the plane was going to crash, Robb said, and suffered 52 seconds of pre-impact terror before the plane hit a tree and a utility pole. The plaintiffs included: Victoria Delacroix, a 22-year-old making her first jump; Melissa Berridge, 38, who was a staff member for a state senator; Robert Cook, a 22-year-old civil engineering student who had completed 1,700 jumps; Rob Walsh, 44, a freelance photographer and certified sky-diving instructor with more than 5,000 jumps under his belt; and Scott Cowan, who was 42. Cowan was the co-owner of Quantum Leap Skydiving and was piloting the plane when it crashed. David Paternoster, a 34-year-old Missouri resident who was also onboard, was not a party to the lawsuit. One woman on board who survived did so because of fellow passenger Cook, Robb explained. Cook told the woman, a first-time skydiver, that the plane was going to crash, and that he was going to position his body to cushion her against the impact. "He sacrificed himself to save her," Robb said, adding that she has since married and recently had a child. Doncasters substituted the different alloy in the blade because it was cheaper than the one recommended by Pratt & Whitney, the engine manufacturer, Robb said, and the alternate alloy was not strong enough to withstand the heat, force and speed of the engine. During the three-week trial, Robb presented expert testimony from an array of fields, including aircraft metallurgy, aircraft failure analysis, accident reconstruction, maintenance, piloting, aircraft design engineering, FAA compliance, pre-impact terror and forensic economics. In addition, he presented evidence that Doncasters knew of eight other engine failures due to the fracture of the same engine part, and showed jurors a photograph taken just as the engine exploded. The defense argued that it wasn't the part that failed, but that somehow a bolt in another section of the engine came loose and caused the failure, Robb said. "There are two problems with that argument. One, it is physically impossible for that bolt to get to the area to cause the damage that was visibly noted in the accident, and secondly, in the history of aviation, a failure of this bolt has never been known to cause a crash," he said. According to Robb, the defense also argued that the blade met FAA certification standards, but Robb's FAA expert testified that the company hid key documents from the FAA showing that the blade had failed performance testing and that the company misled and misrepresented data to the FAA. Trial was broken into two phases: compensatory damages, and if necessary, a punitive damages phase. The jury of seven women and five men deliberated about a day and a half, Robb said, before awarding $4 million to each family. He said the decision to request the same award for each family came from the families themselves. "The families felt that all the compensatory amounts should be the same, because they didn't feel right saying that one of their losses was greater or less than the others," he said. "We told the jury that the plaintiffs wanted the amount of compensatories to be the same, even if it was all $0." Once the compensatory award had been decided, the punitive phase began, with both sides making additional arguments. This time, the jury deliberated less than four hours before awarding an additional $28 million, which will also be evenly split among the plaintiffs, Robb said. The second phase of trial presented the greatest challenge, according to Robb. "In any case involving punitives, convincing people to punish a company is challenging," he said. "The evidence must be clear, and it must be overwhelming." After the trial, Robb spoke with some of the jurors, who said they found the facts of the case "overwhelming that the product was defective and that the company was reckless and manipulative of the FAA." Robb said the verdict is a reminder to attorneys that even so-called conservative jurisdictions can award large sums of money to plaintiffs. "Lawyers who think that they cannot obtain adequate verdicts in small, rural communities are wrong," he said. Published: Mon, May 23, 2011