A few months ago I spent an evening with some friends I had not seen for a while. After a few bottles of a fine Merlot, we discussed most of the world’s most pressing problems.
The conversation covered many points, including the accident in a commercial jet liner when an engine exploded and a piece of the engine hit the fuselage, killing a passenger in a window seat.
My take on the accident was of course sadness for the loss of the passenger, but also great admiration and respect for the pilot who controlled the aircraft and saved all of the other passengers and crew. A true hero.
The other people in the conversation were all trained professional people, but their take on the incident was that the accident was entirely the fault of the airline. And that the airline and aircraft manufacturer were liable for the accident and will need to pay her family a lot of money.
Their reasoning was that the only cause for failure would be lack of or improper maintenance.
Their thought: All accidents are preventable, so if something fails, it means that the airline has not done its job of maintaining the aircraft properly.
I have been working on or with mechanical things for my entire career. I feel that once a machine is put into service, it is a downhill slide to failure. The only question is how long it will last and when is the most inconvenient time for it to fail.
You may be wondering what this has to do with general aviation.
These are the same type of people who work for the general news media and vote. But the real problem for GA is that these people also serve on juries.
If a company is being sued for an aircraft crashing because it ran out of gas, the prosecuting attorney is going to look for these types of people to sit on the jury. When the trial starts, the defense already has two strikes against it and has a real uphill fight just to get to a level field.
An additional problem is that most young people have absolutely no knowledge or interest in how an aircraft engine works. Since aircraft engines are based on 1940’s technology and most cars use 2018 technology, talking about technical problems in aircraft like leaning the carburetor or checking the mags is completely foreign to them. It is like talking in Latin to most people. This means that a defense attorney has to do a complete college course on engines just to get a simple point across.
Unfortunately, logic and common sense do not play a role in most trials. Many attorneys are now taking acting lessons and are getting very good at playing on the emotions of jury members.
When you combine this with a jury pool that thinks you are in the wrong from the very start, it is easy to understand why companies lose cases and why general aviation liability insurance is so high.
When a jury rewards a huge sum of money to a plaintiff even though the accident was no fault of the manufacturer, the GA community loses.
Even when the bill is paid by an insurance company, the cost always comes back to us in increased cost of parts and services.
Risk is what determines rates. Cost of insuring and claims are what determine total costs to the insurance company. With these factors, one looks at where the crashes are that cost money.
What is the risk of insuring a C152 that is NOT used commercially (including people paying to use it to learn to fly)? Really, not all that much until we add in the TT of the pilot and how much they fly in a 12 month period.
That same thing applies to a Hi-Perf Complex single engine. If one crashes that aircraft, how much risk is there? Assume 6 people on board of which 5 are covered by the policy’s liability limits (not so much the PIC assuming the owner is PIC for the flight). How much does the pilot fly, how much training do they get in a year, what ratings and do they maintain IFR currency?
Now add to the risk factor, the number of gear up landings because someone failed to put the gear down for any complex. There are several of these a year, single or multi-engine.
Give you an example. A policy was written for an equity ownership club for a Cherokee-6 (Hi-perf, 6 place fixed gear). The insurance required 100 hours Hi-Perf where the Hi-Perf was greater than 230HP. And the policy required one to be instrument rated. Why this last? Because one doesn’t fly a Six for short hops other than training flights. This plane gets used for serious XC (>100 NM) where one can get into WX trouble.
Move up to the next level, adding complex, and now you have to have 100 hrs complex (minimum) and possibly 10 in make and model before you can fly it solo or with pax (actually two different stipulations).
Why did the insurance company require this? Because of the relatively hi probability that one would land gear up, or otherwise bend the metal with pax on board.
I say all this because I’ve been involved in insuring different aircraft and asking agents why the costs for this or that aircraft.
Now let’s take a lesson from Health Insurers. As the pool of healthy people shrinks (think PP-ACA) the costs to insure someone goes up, especially when “existing condition coverage” is required.
So in the aviation world, as the number of insured aircraft (policies) drop, the costs per policy rise. The more stupid crashes that take place, the more it costs each policy holder.
If we were to double the number of pilots and the number of aircraft and pilots were to fly 50-100 hours per year (each), the risks would actually go down (because the more current experience the less likely to make a dumb mistake or a really bad landing in X/W).
So general aviation insurance rates are high because of lawyers? how original. As an attorney, aircraft owner and a lifetime pilot it amuses me that the same garbage keeps getting shoveled over and over without any regards to the truth. Yet another poorly written unoriginal anti-lawyer article that puts forth a factual scenario that has no application to the author’s conclusion. I fail to see how a company being sued for crashing a plane and running out of gas has anything to do with general aviation. This company that the author alludes to would fall under the heading of airline? or other commercial operator and by definition would fall under the heading of general aviation.
The fact scenario cited by the author admits negligence on the part of the company, and seems to suggest that the injured person is somehow at fault because they should have known that things happen sometimes. The answer in this authors opinion is to essentially make the company immune from suit. So a person is injured as a result of the company’s negligence will have no recourse against the company? What if the person can no longer work? what is they were the sole income for a family? So now they go on disability, who pays for that? we the taxpayers do. Understand when people cannot seek redress for another’s negligence it is society that pays. People that push this BS narrative about lawsuit reform neglect to mention who ultimately pays, the answer is the tax payer. This is the kind of article I would expect from a person that views the world in absolutes.
Most lawyer’s aims are to convince a jury that the accused is guilty. They don’t let facts get in the way!
Gee, I think the airplane liability insurance is quite low. It is seriously lower than my car. I have no collision/hull coverage on my old plane, but I do have liability and it is $236 per year. $100k/$1m.
The insurance company obviously believes the liability on my plane is way less than my pick-up.
I have been flying my Cherokee for 40 years, have 7,000 hours.
Aside from the fact that airline losses only impact GA insurance rates by virtue of reinsurance issues…just how many hours a year do you spend in your car? How many in your aircraft? I drive about 20,000 miles a year…probably at an “average” speed of 40-50 mph. So, I spend 400-500 hours a year in my car, and about 50 hours a year in the air. In a car I am like every other target (at least from the attorney’s position). In the air, I am “fresh-meat to the lions” every time ANYTHING happens. Aviation insurance is indeed a good buy. Just imagine what it would be if all the yahoos you see in cars, were also in planes… and they were driving right at you, just missing a head-on collision by a few feet.
Why would we think that there will be tort reform when the same people who write the laws financially benefit from those laws? As we can see, the lawyer likes the current system, it’s not a left-right issue. Even the insurance industry profits from litigation and higher premiums. Aviation is not the only target, only one of the weakest.
Because of my FAA position and subsequent consulting work I have been exposed to untold number of lawsuits
suits. An interesting point is where did these typically come to trial? Answer: California, Texas, Ohio, &New York! And where the airplane typically built? Wichita, Kansas. Why not sue in Kansas? Liability laws! So,the
plainiff gets to achoose the time & place known for “generous” decisions.
Makes sense to have aviation oriented jurors, but many of these highly educated judges are anything but impartial, evidenced by the anti-Trump judicial antics. They would have to request or . require juror quals.
The author begins the article admitting that “After a few bottles of a fine Merlot . . . we discussed most of the world’s most pressing problems.” (Now there’s a clue as to how scholarly and well-reasoned the comments were late that night).
Out of the world’s most pressing problems that were discussed that night, the author chose – or remembered – only one: a recent unexpected engine failure of a commercial flight by an air carrier to explain “Why general aviation liability insurance is so high.” Did anyone else notice that there is no connection whatsoever between the title and the content of the article? The author did not mention or discuss a general aviation accident, did not discuss general aviation liability insurance, and certainly did not discuss or mention any verdict in a general aviation lawsuit.
In short, after a few bottles of a fine Merlot, Mr. Presser and his friends were less inhibited and speculated that the airline and aircraft manufacturer would be liable for the accident. The author explained their logic:
(1) The only cause for failure would be lack of or improper maintenance;
(2) If something fails, it means that the airline has not done its job of maintaining the aircraft properly.
From this, the author concludes that “The real problem for GA is that these people also serve on juries. In my opinion, this article should be ignored. The title is misleading and the conclusion pre-ordained.
Most people, reasonable people, under the influence of a few bottles of a fine Merlot, will open up and confide their prejudices and pre-conceived notions. In my experience, jurors can set aside those notions and prejudices and base their verdict on the admissible evidence introduced in open court and subjected to rigorous cross-examination.
One suggestion that is to restrict the jury pool to only those persons who have knowledge of aviation. Another complains that without specialized knowledge, “Everything is preloaded in favor of the prosecution.
Lack of specialized knowledge favors neither the plaintiff nor the defendant. Plaintiff’s counsel and Defendant’s counsel have a duty to educate and inform jurors about technical issues in many diverse cases, not just aviation. It happens every day, for example, in medical cases, automobile accidents and construction litigation.
I am a retired trial lawyer with 38 years’ experience with judges, jurors and trials. I claim some experience and knowledge of judges, trials and juries. In my 38 years of trying cases before juries, I can assure you most of the time, the jury got it right, even on those cases that I lost. I would not recommend changing jury selection in the manner suggested.
It figures that a trial lawyer would think that the job of a lawyer is to educate the uneducated about whatever case is before them. The meter keeps running, to take up more time and amass more fees is the lawyers lament. So let’s have more lawyers.
As highly educated and powerful these judges are (remember they’re now constantly overruling the president of the United States), you would think a judge could request that only jurors with aviation knowledge sit on an aviation case.
Such people like pilots, A&P mechanics can easily be found in the FAA files. What’s so hard about that?
One of the biggest obstacles to the defence in an aviation-related court case is that most, if not all, jurors, including the judge, have no knowledge of aviation at all. They don’t know what makes an aircraft fly, or how an engine or aircraft systems work, let alone what required maintenance is. So what enables these people to hear an aviation case? Everything is preloaded in favor of the prosecution!
Sad but true!