Travis Barker blames pilots, equipment for crash [Archive]

AnthonyGA

22nd Nov 2008, 17:16

See

Travis Barker Blames Pilots, Equipment for Plane Crash - Crime & Courts, : People.com (http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20242200,00.html)

Granted, People isn't exactly Aviation Week, but it would be interesting to see exactly what happened and exactly what Barker alleges. Apparently he alleges in part that the pilots "negligently decided to abort" the take-off after a tire blew.

chuks

22nd Nov 2008, 17:53

More likely attorneys acting for Mr Barker, since it reads like the usual legal boilerplate, mostly of interest to other lawyers.

For people in aviation what usually counts is the accident report, not whatever a jury decides in the civil case following an accident.

You can often read an NTSB report that says one thing and a jury decision that says something completely different. No surprise since the accident report is designed to find a cause and not blame while a jury is aiming for the opposite.

Too, attorneys often pursue very far-fetched scenarios hoping to win a case. There was a high-profile one I remember where someone, according to the NTSB, went low on a non-precision approach and crashed. An attorney made out that he actually crashed because of an inflight fire, something impossible to prove or disprove from the post-crash evidence, since the airplane burned completely after it went in.

Was it burning as it went in? Who can say, really? There was no obvious reason for it to catch fire in that way but anything is theoretically possible.

It worked and he won a lot of money but that was neither here nor there in terms of safety.

Another thing you can see is that everyone who built some part of a crash airplane will be named in the suit, as mentioned in this article. Some widget manufacturer ends up carrying a vast amount of insurance, part of the reason aircraft parts can be crazily expensive.