Aviation Law Monitor : Aviation Lawyer & Attorney : Michael Danko Law Firm : California Airplane & Helicopter Crashes : Aviation Law Monitor

The NTSB has released its preliminary report of the off-airport landing of Lancair IV-P N9JE at Hilton Head.  The accident killed a jogger but left the plane’s two occupants uninjured. According to the preliminary report, 

Further examination of the airplane revealed that the propeller assembly separated from the crankshaft flange and was missing.

In other words, the crankshaft failed.

One wouldn’t expect a crankshaft to break absent some sort of defect. If that proves to be the case, could the manufacturer of the crankshaft be held liable to the jogger’s family?

The aircraft was built from a kit and was thus "experimental." The engine, however, was not. Rather, according to FAA records, it appears that the engine was an FAA-certified, turbocharged piston engine manufactured by Teledyne Continental Motors, a company that has had its share of lawsuits related to its engines coming apart in flight. 

The General Aviation Revitalization Act, or GARA, protects aircraft engine manufacturers from liability for defective engine parts older than 18 years.

We don’t know how old the engine was in this case.  However, the Lancair builder had reportedly taken the engine from a Piper Malibu.  Piper stopped using the Teledyne Continental TSIO-520 engine in its Malibus due to reliability problems. In 1988, it switched and began installing Avco Lycoming engines instead. Thus, if it turns out that the engine was an original equipment Malibu engine, then it had to be at least 20 years old -- 2 years beyond GARA's age limit.

So is Teledyne Continental Motors off the hook, regardless of whether the jogger's family can prove that the engine was defective? 

No.

There is one important but little-known exception to GARA.  Regardless of the defective part's age, GARA doesn’t protect its manufacturer from lawsuits brought by the families of those killed on the ground.  

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Aircraft engine manufacturers recommend that owners overhaul their engines when they accumulate a certain amount of operating time, usually between 1200 and 2400 hours depending on the engine's make and model. For example, Teledyne Continental Motors suggests that owners overhaul its IO-550 model engine at 2000 hours. Textron Lycoming suggests that owners overhaul its O-235 engine, like the one pictured, at 2400 hours.

Overhauls are expensive.  Some can cost $40,000 or more.  An increasing number of owners opt to run their engines 200, 400 or more hours past the manufacturer's recommended "time between overhauls," or TBO.  Once past TBO, they may take extra precautions by, for example, regularly sending out engine oil samples for spectrographic analysis, checking the engine’s compression, and looking inside certain parts of the engine with a boroscope to insure that  things look good. They feel the manufacturer's TBO recommendations are somewhat arbitrary. By running their engines past TBO they are squeezing more life out of them, and that just makes good economic sense.

The FAA does not require private owners to comply with the manufacturer’s stated TBO interval. The manufacturer's TBO is therefore advisory only.  As long as a properly certified mechanic has

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Burdett v. Teledyne Continental Motors involved the forced landing of a Beech Bonanza after the Teledyne Continental IO-550 engine installed in the aircraft came apart in cruise flight. The passenger was severely injured.

The National Transportation Safety Board blamed the engine failure on the mechanic who last worked on the engine, and cleared the engine manufacturer, Teledyne Continental, from any liability. 

We suspected that the NTSB's determination had been influenced by Teledyne's engineers, who the NTSB had allowed to assist in the investigation, despite the obvious conflict of interest that presented.  We thus conducted our own, independant investigation.  We concluded that, contrary to the NTSB's findings, Teledyne Continental was to blame.  After a six-week trial, the jury agreed.

At its annual convention in San Francisco, the California Trial Lawyers Association, known as the Consumer Attorneys of California, honored aviation accident attorney Mike Danko as a Trial Lawyer of the Year finalist for 2009 in recognition of our work in the Burdett case. The Trial Lawyers Association showed this video presentation during the ceremony.

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Bonanza N618MW, a Beechcraft like the one pictured below, was doing "touch & goes" at Jack Northrop field in Hawthorne.  "Touch and goes" are practice landings where the pilot does not stop on the runway.  Instead, after the wheels touch down, the pilot advances the throttle, takes off again, and then circles around for another landing.  Everything appeared to be fine until, on one of the "goes", the Bonanza's engine quit.  The Bonanza crashed into a parking lot.  The three people on board were killed. 

Why did the engine quit?

Fuel?  Most engine failures are the result of either fuel exhaustion (no avgas in any of the aircraft's tanks), fuel starvation (pilot fails to switch to a full tank when the one he is using runs dry), or fuel contamination (water or jet fuel has found its way into the avgas).  So in any case involving engine failure, fuel has to be considered.

When, as here, there is no post-crash fire, fuel exhaustion is a prime suspect. No fire often means that there was no avgas (aviation gasoline) on board to burn. But it's unlikely this accident was caused by fuel exhaustion.  Though it didn't ignite, there was plenty of avgas spilled on the parking lot where the aircraft crashed. That means there was fuel on board.

Did the pilot fail to switch to a full tank when the one he was using ran dry? That, too, is unlikely.  Witnesses reported that the aircraft was streaming smoke.  An airplane doesn't stream smoke when it runs out of gas.  So both fuel exhaustion and fuel starvation can probably be ruled out as a cause of the engine failure..

Could the engine have quit because of fuel contamination?  If the avgas was contaminated with either water or jet fuel, the engine would have failed on the first takeoff. It would not have been able to perform multiple takeoffs before quitting. Nor would the engine have smoked. We can likely rule out fuel contamination.

Mechanical Failure.  Once fuel issues are ruled out, mechanical failure appears as the next most likely cause of the engine's quitting. Aircraft engines are not supposed to fail without warning. When they do, it is often because of something the engine manufacturer did or failed to do. For example, the manufacturer may have designed the engine improperly or carelessly assembled it. Some of the legal theories that the victims' families can assert to hold the manufacturer responsible are discussed here and here.

The engine installed in N618MW was a model IO-550.  It was manufactured by Teledyne Continental Motors.  Engine manufacturers such as Teledyne often try to avoid liability for causing an accident by asserting the protection of the General Aviation Revitalization Act, or GARA, discussed here.  However, the engine installed in N618MW was manufactured in 2005.  GARA does not apply to engines that are less than 18 years old, such as this one, and so the families will be legally permitted to hold Teledyne responsible for any defects in the engine.

The NTSB Investigation.  The NTSB is investigating the cause of the crash.  The NTSB will ask Teledyne Continental Motors to participate in the investigation, and to help it determine the cause of the accident.  As part of the investigation, the NTSB, along with representatives of Teledyne, will disassemble the engine and test its various parts. (Pictured right is an IO-550 engine being disassembled after a crash in 2001.) Of course, since Teledyne itself might be responsible for the crash, it's participation in the investigation presents a conflict of interest.   It is like the police asking the suspect for help in solving the crime. To make matters worse, the NTSB will not allow the victims' families or the families' lawyers to participate in the investigation at all. The conflict of interest is discussed further here.

The conflict of interest makes for biased NTSB reports that tend to favor the manufacturers.  In one recent case, a Teledyne model IO-550 engine -- just like the one in this case -- was installed in a Beechcraft Bonanza that had departed Van Nuys, Californa.  The engine quit and the plane crashed. The NTSB asked Teledyne Continental Motors to participate in its investigation and help it determine why the engine failed.  Not surprising, after hearing only Teledyne's side of the story, the NTSB determined that the engine failed because of poor maintenance, and not anything that Teledyne did.  In fact, the NTSB cleared Teledyne completely of any blame.  We investigated ourselves and later brought the matter to trial. After hearing all the evidence in the case -- not just the evidence favorable to Teledyne -- the jury disagreed with the NTSB.   The jury determined that the engine quit because Teledyne's IO-550 maintenance manuals were wrong, and awarded the injured passenger $15 million. 

What to do? Teledyne Continental Motors and its lawyers are already "investigating" the crash.  The families should consider retaining competent aviation lawyers immediately.  The families' lawyer can begin their own investigation and make sure that important evidence is preserved.  Unfortunately, the families cannot rely on the NTSB to find answers. They need to find their own.

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