The manufacturer of an airplane engine that failed mid-flight can t escape paying a $2.7 million verdict to the widow of one of the passengers killed in the resulting fatal crash, a federal judge has ruled.
U.S. District Judge Curtis Joyner of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania denied Continental Motors Inc. s request to toss the jury's verdict. Continental manufactured the engine in the Cessna T210L that crashed and killed the pilot and two U.S. Forest Service surveyors aboard.
The lawsuit brought by Elizabeth Snider and the estate of her husband, surveyor Daniel Snider, alleges that Continental negligently manufactured a replacement cylinder put in the engine six years before the accident. Continental claimed the jury s award couldn t be justified because there was no way to prove that it manufactured the component that caused the accident.
In reviewing the trial record of this case under the lens of the preceding authority, we find that plaintiff produced sufficient documentary and testimonial evidence at trial that Continental manufactured a replacement part which was installed in the accident aircraft s engine some six years prior to the June, 2010 crash, Joyner wrote in his opinion.
Because the record pointed to the cylinder being the cause of the accident, Joyner said Snider s claims weren t barred under the General Aviation Revitalization Act, as Continental argued. The GARA was enacted in 1994 to limit the liability for the declining long-tail aviation industry.
This is a developing story.