February 17, 2010
Families of Plane Crash Victims Must Put Value on Grief
A year after Continental Connection Flight 3407 plunged into a house near Buffalo, killing all 49 people on board and a man in the house, lawyers are preparing to negotiate in dollars and cents the price of raw grief and loss.
Thirty-four lawsuits filed by the husbands, wives and children of passengers demand compensation for negligence, wrongful death and punitive damages from Houston-based Continental Airlines and Colgan Air, the Manassas, Va., regional carrier operating the Feb. 12, 2009, flight. Also named are Colgan parent Pinnacle Airlines of Memphis, Tenn.; Montreal-based Bombardier Aerospace, which made the plane; and FlightSafety International, which helped train the pilots.
The flight took off from Newark Liberty International Airport.
The legal process has been jarring to families, who have grieved over missed birthdays, holidays and wedding anniversaries. The legal system’s demands are more tangible.
Spouses have been asked to complete 30-page questionnaires meant to help establish not only loved ones’ lost earnings, but the individual’s value to school, community and family.
"They want to go all the way back to high school and find out what kind of student Darren was, was he active in the community, what does he do for the community, how many hours a week does he spend helping the kids with homework, grocery shopping, doing landscaping," said Robin Tolsma. Her husband, Darren, a father of two, worked for defense contractor Northrup-Grumman and died in Row 4 on the hour-long flight from Newark.
She spoke after a recent court hearing where a judge and more than two dozen lawyers met to discuss scheduling and other housekeeping matters.
"It’s like we have to prove our husbands’ lives were worth something," said Jennifer West, whose husband, Ernie, was Tolsma’s co-worker and father of 3-year-old Summer West. "You can’t put a price tag on a human life."
Attorney James Kreindler, whose law firm has represented passengers and families in more than 60 air crashes since the 1970s, said the paperwork is standard.
"The only way the legal system can come to a conclusion is to make the defendants pay money to each family based on fair standards," Kreindler said.
Any awards will come either through a mediated settlement or at a jury trial to establish who was at fault and to what extent, though virtually all air disaster lawsuits are settled before trial.
Kreindler, who secured $2.7 billion for the families of the 270 victims of the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, predicted that the Flight 3407 families each could receive "a seven-figure or eight-figure recovery."
A key issue, Kreindler said, will be whether plaintiffs succeed in winning punitive damages, meant to punish the defendants.
The National Transportation Safety Board reported Feb. 2 that the pilot’s improper response to a low-speed warning led the Buffalo-bound plane to go down just 5 miles from its destination. While the NTSB findings cannot be used in court, they confirm claims in the lawsuits about pilot error and whether they had been properly trained.
"That’s what this case is about," Kreindler said. "It’s not just how inept the pilots were, the mistakes they made, but showing that these were corporations that were not … having properly paid, rested, trained people in the cockpit to save money, and that they should be punished for it."
In court papers, the defendants have denied allegations they recklessly operated and monitored Flight 3407, improperly trained its crew and that the aircraft was not equipped to fly in icy conditions.
Bombardier attorney Richard Musat said the company has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on software and training in preparation for the unwieldy legal action.
"They’ve asked for every part on the airplane … [including] the bolts on the tires," Musat said.
