Another Wacky Court Judgment

Aero-Views by Kevin R.C. "Hognose" O'Brien

I tend to look with a suspicion at charges that controllers are responsible for crashes. Certainly, there are times that it happens, and they stick in your mind for their sheer rarity: In Sarasota, FL, five years ago last week, confused controllers cleared one plane to position and hold at an intersection, and another to take off from the beginning of the same runway. The photo shows what happened when the C-172 and C-150, both on training flights, merged on the runway. At least three of the four people in the aircraft survived the impact, but burned to death. Not my first choice of death, and probably not their's either, but the decision was made for them. You can read the report here: www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/brief.asp?ev_id=20001212X20686&key=1

The Sarasota runway collision is the most blatant illustration I know, of the old gag: "If the pilot screws up, the pilot dies, but if the controller screws up, what happens?" (Answer, of course, "the pilot dies.") The FAA subsequently returned the controllers to duty, so if you are in Circus City, exercise extra caution. On the bright side, they're unlikely to make *that* particular mistake again. And, to be sure, a healthy degree of paranoid rubbernecking is good any time the controllers give you the runway -- even if they haven't given it to someone else, there is small comfort in being right, but burned to a crisp.

Yet it has become customary for lawsuits to make grand charges that controllers are responsible for crashes -- even in cases where the responsibility clearly resided between the left and right earcups of the pilot's headset. Why do they do this? It isn't because lawyers are against controllers (at least, not any more than they are against all of us). It's because controllers work for the FAA -- part of the federal government -- the ultimate in deep pockets. In other words, it's the reason lawyers do anything: in the legal profession, it's all about money.

What beings this into mind is the past week's award of $9.5 million to the bereaved after an all-too-common disorientation accident at JAX. 

Perhaps the lawyers in this case were especially motivated because two of the slain, including the pilot, were lawyers themselves. If they hadn't managed to band together to pin the liability tail on some the Federal donkey, why, the passengers in the plane, who were clients of the lawyer-pilot and his partner, would seem to have had an excellent cause of action against the lawyer-pilot. But that's being logical, which betrays to the world that I am not a lawyer -- for logic, like justice, has no place in American tort law.

Well, let's look that accident at JAX. Let's see what the NTSB, which uses disinterested experts, rather than the truth-is-the-first-casualty adversarial system, to get to the bottom of a crash, said about that one: www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/brief.asp?ev_id=20011218X02407&key=1

"The National Transportation Safety Board determines the probable cause(s) of this accident as follows: The pilot becoming spatially disoriented and losing control of the airplane during a missed approach resulting in the airplane descending uncontrolled and colliding with trees and the ground."

Odd. Not a word about those controllers.

The facts of the case: On the afternoon of December 12, 2001, Attorney Donald Weidner, his partner, Thomas Bowden, and their clients, were traveling to St. Augustine from Ft. Lauderdale (a relatively short flight, for those who don't know their Florida geography). The weather in the St. Augustine area was marginal, due to a stationary front hanging across the Florida panhandle and peninsula and heading out to sea to the east, just south of Jacksonville. After getting briefed, Weidner filed an IFR flight plan, with Craig Airport in Jacksonville as an alternate. Craig and St. Augustine, and Jacksonville International, are all within a few miles of one another, and there is seldom much weather difference between them. But there was clear weather just south of Jax.

The flight departed at ten minutes to six, and by seven he had gone missed at St. Augustine and routed to Craig, accepting a controller's suggestion of Jacksonville International as a fallback if he couldn't get into Craig. The MDA at JAX is only 200 feet AGL -- if he could get in anywhere north of the frontline, that would be the most likely place. In December it's pretty dark at seven at ILS altitudes  -- the NTSB doesn't mention it, but it's a factor in the pilot's workload, for sure.

He couldn't get into Craig. (Which bodes ill for getting into JAX, as these three airports are, as I said, all quite close to one another). 

Proceeding to JAX, and attempting the ILS to Runway 7, he went missed again, but on the missed approach had the experience recounted by NTSB in the statement of probable cause above. He and his passengers didn't survive the high-speed, steeply banked impact with trees and terrain.

Per NTSB: "Recorded radar data indicate that before radar contact was lost the airplane did complete circling turns to the left while at the same time climbing to 1000 feet and then descending to 300 feet." This is not the missed approach procedure for After that it disappeared from radar. National Guardsmen on the airfield heard, and one saw, the doomed Cherokee Six pass by, turning and then heard its impact. It would take many hours for rescuers to find the wreckage.

After the missed approach, Weidner apparently became disoriented, and his last garbled transmission indicated that his instruments were malfunctioning. (post-crash examination shows that the instruments were functioning. It is common in cases of spatial disorientation for pilots to misinterpret instruments).

Another pilot reported that he "heard the pilot of N7701J report on the approach to runway 7, followed by the pilot reporting he was making a missed approach. This pilot reported he could hear stress in the voice of the pilot of N7701J. The local controller did not respond to the pilot of N7701J reporting a missed approach. After a time the local controller then asked the pilot of N7701J what his position was. About 5 seconds later the pilot of N7701J transmitted something like his instruments were "haywire or goofy", with stress in his voice."

To be continued...

FMI: www.faa.gov, www.atra.org   www.overlawyered.com