Airchway Skydiving Sued

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The main person who was negligent in this was the rigger who didn't route the loop through the cutter. Chances are, he doesn't have deep enough pockets to sue.

No, the main person who was negligent was the student that didn't pull.

Not routing the loop properly didn't kill anyone. It may have prevented the Cypres from being able to have the chance to deploy the reserve, but it didn't kill anyone.

Had the rigger misrigged it in a way that pulling the reserve handle caused a reserve total, then I could see you having a case.

I do not have a manual in front of me, but have been corrected when I was newbie that a Cypres does not DEPLOY the reserve, it activates a cutter to cut the loop.

I'm sure I will be corrected if I am wrong/


J

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The main person who was negligent in this was the rigger who didn't route the loop through the cutter. Chances are, he doesn't have deep enough pockets to sue.

No, the main person who was negligent was the student that didn't pull.

Not routing the loop properly didn't kill anyone. It may have prevented the Cypres from being able to have the chance to deploy the reserve, but it didn't kill anyone.

Had the rigger misrigged it in a way that pulling the reserve handle caused a reserve total, then I could see you having a case.

I do not have a manual in front of me, but have been corrected when I was newbie that a Cypres does not DEPLOY the reserve, it activates a cutter to cut the loop.

I'm sure I will be corrected if I am wrong/

You are correct - I worded it poorly. The Cypres suts the loop to give the reserve a chance to deploy -- I will edit my original.

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>No, the main person who was negligent was the student that didn't pull.

Agreed. Unfortunately, there was more negligence than that in this case.

An equivalent case might be an unscrupulous auto mechanic who did not replace an airbag to save money. If the driver gets in an accident and is killed, he is the person responsible for the accident - but the mechanic may well bear some of the legal liability,

airbags are federally mandated. AADs are not.

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>No, the main person who was negligent was the student that didn't pull.

Agreed. Unfortunately, there was more negligence than that in this case.

An equivalent case might be an unscrupulous auto mechanic who did not replace an airbag to save money. If the driver gets in an accident and is killed, he is the person responsible for the accident - but the mechanic may well bear some of the legal liability,

I dislike this analogy.

This scenario involves wanton disregard for safety and intentional inaction on the part of the mechanic for the purpose of monetary gain.

I am hard pressed to imagine that any rigger would intentionally misroute the loop. In addition, there is no monetary gain for the rigger.

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airbags are federally mandated. AADs are not.

AADs are required for students by USPA.
There's really no way around this, a safety device that would have likely saved this jumper was defeated by the negligence of the rigger/owner of the dropzone.

You can pretty much take the waiver the student signed, and light it on fire.

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airbags are federally mandated. AADs are not.

AADs are required for students by USPA.
There's really no way around this, a safety device that would have likely saved this jumper was defeated by the negligence of the rigger/owner of the dropzone.

You can pretty much take the waiver the student signed, and light it on fire.

FAR Part 105.43(c) states:

(c) If installed, the automatic activation device must be maintained in accordance with manufacturer instructions for that automatic activation device.

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>No, the main person who was negligent was the student that didn't pull.

Agreed. Unfortunately, there was more negligence than that in this case.

An equivalent case might be an unscrupulous auto mechanic who did not replace an airbag to save money. If the driver gets in an accident and is killed, he is the person responsible for the accident - but the mechanic may well bear some of the legal liability,

I can't say I agree with that. Perhaps if the mechanic was performing maintainence on the airbag and miswired it when reinstalling it such that it didn't go off in an accident, that would be "equivalent."

It's difficult to argue that the rigger stood anything to gain from misrouting a closing loop, or that doing so indicated he was unscrupulous in any way. It doesn't save you time to perform that step incorrectly and, as I believe this was a Wings with the cutter at the bottom, misrouting the loop means you were inspecting/replacing it and not skimping on materials.

Suppose you had an independent rigger go through his logbook and open and inspect all the other rigs in service with his seal on them and everything looked good?

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airbags are federally mandated. AADs are not.

AADs are required for students by USPA.
There's really no way around this, a safety device that would have likely saved this jumper was defeated by the negligence of the rigger/owner of the dropzone.

You can pretty much take the waiver the student signed, and light it on fire.

FAA = federal regulatory agency. Thus regulatory law.
USPA = an interest group, no legal jurisdiction

If anything your argument brings into light a possibility of shared liability between the deceased and whichever other externality may not been responsible.

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airbags are federally mandated. AADs are not.

AADs are required for students by USPA.
There's really no way around this, a safety device that would have likelymay have saved this jumper was defeated by the negligence of the rigger/owner of the dropzone.

Still doesn't mean that he caused his death, nor should he be liable for it.

I'm sure the student's family has hired a team of very good personal injury attorneys.

Do we have to spoon feed them here.

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Suppose you had an independent rigger go through his logbook and open and inspect all the other rigs in service with his seal on them and everything looked good?

There are two kinds of riggers: those who have made a mistake, and those who will. We're all regular people, sometimes shit happens. I still don't agree with the DZ being sued, IMHO it looks like they're going after the deep pockets of the business.

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FAA = federal regulatory agency. Thus regulatory law.
USPA = an interest group, no legal jurisdiction

If this was a crimnal case, that would be a factor, however in a civil case, no actual law needs to be broken for the courts to find against you. All they have to prove is that your actions damaged persons or property, and you're 'guilty'.

As it pretains to this case, the BSRs are tantamount to law, as they represent the 'standard industry practice', and in the absence of an actual law governing the actions of person or business, the 'standard industry practice' can be used to determine negilence or liability.

It's one of the reasons that a BSR is such a bitch to create. The USPA knows that once they create one, every DZO (in the US) will essentially be bound to it, or risk losing the effectivness of their waiver should an incident occur. That's why so many new things are intruduced as 'reccomendations', because it gives the DZOs more lattitude in following, possibly bending, or straight up shit-canning the reccomendation.

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I hope that they have a good wavier and its enforced.

And I hope they have the clause in it that states the suing party is responsible for ALL legal fees and court costs if they lose the lawsuit.

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You are stating things like they are a fact but you have very little historical information and understanding of skydiving since in October you were saying you've never made a jump before...

Textbook example of "ad hominem" - you are attacking the person and not the facts he is presenting.

An AAD correctly installed and functioning would have a high probability (>50%) of preventing death if the skydiver does not pull. Historically, the statistics show this to be true.

On a separate note, I highly doubt any lawyer is being encouraged or dissuaded to pursue legal action by this thread. Discussing it is not letting the cat out of the bag nor offering aid and comfort to the legal profession. I only wish frivolous lawsuits would go away if we didn't discuss the incident - but they won't.

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Suppose you had an independent rigger go through his logbook and open and inspect all the other rigs in service with his seal on them and everything looked good?

There are two kinds of riggers: those who have made a mistake, and those who will. We're all regular people, sometimes shit happens. I still don't agree with the DZ being sued, IMHO it looks like they're going after the deep pockets of the business.

Agreed. People can argue about how difficult or easy a mistake it was to have made, but I don't think portraying it as anything but that is reasonable.

Also, it's unfortunate that "net casting" lawsuits can't be more effectively discouraged by the legal system. It would be nice if the act of suing the guy who worked at the gas station where you filled up the morning before driving to the dropzone could be held against you in the lawsuit you filled against the rigger. I don't know that there's a good/fair way to make that work.

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I hope that they have a good wavier and its enforced.

Did the people who filed suit sign a waiver? If not, then I think it won't matter.

I am offering no opinion as to the merits of this case and/or incident.

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Still doesn't mean that he caused his death, nor should he be liable for it.

As I understand it, this is not about cause. It is about contribution. I think the attorney is wanting to assign values of contribution and/or causation in order to exchange that finding for a monetary judgment.

IMO except for the "thrill factor" this case isn't about skydiving. It could be about anything. The purpose of the suit isn't to understand skydiving, skydiving practices, regulations or policies, other than how they pertain to individual and/or corporate culpability. The purpose is to assign percentages of blame (some of which will be assigned to the deceased) and determine if and how much those percentages are monetarily valued.

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You are stating things like they are a fact but you have very little historical information and understanding of skydiving since in October you were saying you've never made a jump before...

Perhaps, I just prefer anonymity? Would it make a difference if I had 1262 jumps and a D-license?

In the end, the last thing that this case will be about is skydiver's opinions on it, or what was posted on a message board.

This is now a tort case and I'm looking at it from the legal side, just as the courts will tell the jury to.

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This is now a tort case and I'm looking at it from the legal side, just as the courts will tell the jury to.

And just like the court will see, there are two ways to look at the situation. Your way implies that Airtec has some responsibility toward ensuring that the loop is routed through the cutter.

The flip side of that is that the instructions are very clear that the loop needs to routed through the cutter, and that's as far as Airtec can be held responsible for. It truth, the federal government, more specifically the FAA, should be held responsible becasue they are ones who certified the rigger in question as being capable of maintaining parachute equipment in accordance with the FARs, which state that all equipment must be assembled and maintainted to the standard set forth by the manufacturer. Airtec set an acceptable standard, and the FAA certified rigger failed to maintain the rig in question to that standard.

In my flying club we had a Cessna T210. a guy joined the club just to get this 6 seat airplane to fly his friends from Phoenix to Laughlin, NV. He got checked out okay. The club owner told him NOT TO ARRIVE IN THE DARK at Laughlin, NV
The guy did. They hit the powerlines. 6 dead. They sued the hell out of our club and said we wanted the guy to fly a bigger plane so we could make more money !! They won !! several million !!! The insurance company said.. no more neat, cool airplanes for your club !!!

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And just like the court will see, there are two ways to look at the situation.

I agree with you there, Dave.

Now, speaking just about the Airtec issue, Airtec's claim, and the one that everyone usually points out, is that a Cypres doesn't actually deploy the reserve canopy, it only cuts the reserve closing loop, when certain altitude and descent speed criteria are met, period! A Cypres has no other function, at all.

In this situation, there is a Cypres unit that indicates that it's ready to use even though its one and only reason for existence has been made non-functional by a rigger's mistake.

Airtec is going to have to show that it is not foreseeable that a rigger could forget to route the closing loop through the cutter, which leaves Airtec in the position of pointing fingers and shouting, "Negligence," at the rigger.

On the other hand, if forgetting to route the closing loop through the cutter is foreseeable then Airtec is going to have to show what steps they've taken to account for that. An obvious complication here is that there is no way to check the placement of the closing loop until the reserve is repacked in six months, or until the reserve is deployed manually, or until someone dies.

Airtec's "cutting the reserve closing loop" vs. "deploying the reserve" claim may just come back and bite them in the butt on this one.

I hope it doesn't, and believe it or not, I really do feel for the rigger; it was a horrible mistake that I'm sure he didn't do intentionally. But somebody died, and that changes everything.