Silkair Crash, Court Case Decision.
Woomera, I know this is NOT strictly Australia or New Zealand, but is of interest locally........
(QUOTE)
Families lose suit over SilkAir crash in Indonesia
High Court rules plaintiffs - from S'pore, Malaysia, US and Britain - failed to prove pilot deliberately caused plane to crash
By Alethea Lim
COURT CORRESPONDENT
THE High Court yesterday dismissed a lawsuit against SilkAir by families of six of the 104 people killed when Flight MI 185 crashed in Indonesia four years ago.
No proof found Capt Tsu turned off "black boxes".
Justice Tan Lee Meng ruled yesterday that they had failed to prove the pilot deliberately caused the Boeing 737 to crash into the Musi River on Dec 19, 1997, on a flight from Jakarta to Singapore.
The families who had sued SilkAir, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Singapore Airlines, will also have to pay costs.
During the 15-day trial here, their lawyer, Senior Counsel Michael Khoo sketched a scenario of an aircraft being purposely put into a nosedive.
Justice Tan noted in a 132-page written ruling that their action ''rested on circumstantial evidence'' and it was not easy to prove their case because there was so little evidence.
The plaintiffs - parents, children and spouses of those killed in the crash - were from Singapore, Malaysia, the United States and Britain.
Mr Khoo said Capt Tsu had deliberately turned off both the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder, to hide any sign that he made the plane crash.
But Justice Tan said in his ruling that it was not proven that the devices, often referred to as ''black boxes'', were disconnected on purpose. They could have stopped recording because of electrical failure.
He said there was also no evidence that the electrical device that controlled the plane's descent, called the stabiliser trim, was set for a nosedive.
Mr Khoo had argued that the plane's pilot, Captain Tsu Way Ming, and its first officer, Duncan Ward, could have put the plane on full throttle, causing it to nosedive at high speed.
But the judge agreed with SilkAir's lawyer, Mr Lok Vi Ming, that it was possible the engines were on high power because the pilots were trying to recover from the plane's ''unusually'' high altitude of 35,000 feet and not because they were trying to down it.
The judge questioned the accuracy of the projected flight trajectory of the plane's nosediving from its cruising altitude of 35,000 feet to 19,500 feet and a set of corrected radar data on which it was based.
He accepted the evidence of one of SilkAir's expert witnesses, Professor Denis Howe, who said that from that data, the plane would have been travelling faster than the speed of sound, which is beyond the capabilities of a Boeing 737.
The judge said there was no evidence that Capt Tsu or First Officer Ward had intended to commit suicide or murder.
He noted that from the conversation recorded before the voice recorder became disabled, the two men had been chatting ''without any hint of tension or any sign that something ominous was to unfold a few minutes later''.
He rejected the United States National Transport Safety Board's view that the pilot purposely caused the plane to crash, although he acknowledged that the board was ''very experienced in aircraft accident investigation''.
''It is not infallible and it has altered its conclusions on the cause of some, albeit a limited number, of air crashes in the light of subsequent evidence, which showed that its original conclusions were wrong,'' he said.
Mr Thomas Oey, 39, a lecturer at a Baptist seminary, who lost his mother Berenice Braislin Oey, 71, and brother Jonathan Edward Oey, 39, in the crash, told The Straits Times: ''I'm disappointed. But I felt we needed to do right by bringing this lawsuit. It was a matter of public interest to know the truth behind the cause of the crash.''
Dr Roy Joseph, who lost his brother John in the crash, said: ''It would be a great shame and grave injustice to the families of those who perished... if SilkAir, the airline industry and civil-aviation authorities used the judgment to blind themselves to the numerous lessons to be learnt from the incident.''
When asked if the families would appeal, Mr Khoo said they would have to study the judgment first.
SilkAir said yesterday that, like everyone else, it had hoped to find the truth and understand what caused the crash. It said: ''Unfortunately, the official investigators and, now, the High Court, have been unable to come to a conclusion.''