Settlements have been reached in the USA over two Asian air accidents that together killed more than 300 people.
Singapore Airlines (SIA) settled in Los Angeles on 18 September with a retired US university professor who sued the carrier for negligence in the crash of a Boeing 747-400 in Taipei nearly three years ago.
Lawyers with California legal firm Greene, Broillet, Panish & Wheeler claim the airline settled for a "substantial sum of money" two days after the trial began.
The law firm was representing Harald Linke, who was one of the passengers on flight SQ006. The 747-400 crashed at Taipei's Chiang Kai Shek International Airport on 31 October 2000, killing 83 of the 179 people on board. Linke survived the crash but claimed to have suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. His case was the first SQ006 lawsuit to go to trial in the USA. He was suing the carrier for unspecified damages.
In a separate case in Chicago, Hamilton Sundstrand settled on 22 September with families of 26 victims of the September 1997 crash of a Garuda Indonesia Airbus A300B4 in North Sumatra, Indonesia, in which all 234 people on board were killed. The payout is expected to average $600,000 for each victim.
The lawsuits alleged Hamilton Sundstrand's Mk II ground proximity warning system (GPWS) "failed to perform as represented and did not give the pilots a timely warning, thus causing the crash".
Chicago-based Nolan Law Group planned to argue the system has inherent design flaws. It claimed available flight data recorder information showed the GPWS sounded an alarm only 5s prior to the aircraft's first impact with a tree.
Source: Flight International
