If giving bad information gets the FAA into court....we will never get a decision out of them now!
FAA PAYS $9.5 MILLION FOR CRASH...
The FAA last Wednesday awarded a $9.5 million settlement to the families of four people who died when a Piper Cherokee crashed in Florida in December 2001, according to News4Jax.com. The pilot had made two missed approaches while trying to land in heavy fog at Jacksonville International Airport. The NTSB in April 2003 found the probable cause of the accident was that the pilot became spatially disoriented and lost control of the airplane during a missed approach. A federal judge last November ruled that while the pilot was 35 percent responsible, air traffic controllers were 65 percent to blame for the crash because they had failed to provide current weather information to the pilot, contributing to the disorientation. More...
...AS MORE SUITS PENDING
Lawyers for the family of a 20-year-old pilot who died in a California accident in May 2004 also are preparing to file a wrongful-death suit against the FAA, according to CDAPress.com. Two pilots in a Piper Seminole were killed when they hit a mountain while flying IFR near Julian, Calif. The accident aircraft was the fourth of five Seminoles with similar call signs that were flying the same route together, and when a controller authorized one aircraft to descend, the wrong aircraft acknowledged the clearance. The NTSB said in December 2004 that the probable cause for the accident was that the controller issued the descent clearance using a partial call sign and failed to detect that the clearance was read back by the wrong pilot. The pilots also failed to question the clearance to an altitude below the published Minimum Enroute Altitude (MEA), the NTSB said. A contributing factor was that two controllers -- at the Center and the TRACON -- failed to properly respond to aural and visual minimum-altitude alerts from their equipment. More...
