The Trial
To begin with, let me say that I hope you heeded the warning on the previous page. It will take me a while to assimilate everything I learned in going over the court records, but when I'm done there will be a lot of things here that will seem insensitive. The lawyers involved in this case did not spare anyone! My feelings from the beginning of my knowledge of this tragedy were that it was completely the fault of the FAA in their lack of providing adequate radar coverage for the area in question. It turns out that that notion is, as in all things "legal", subject to interpretation. The bottom line is, it doesn't matter, because 83 people are dead.
Still, in the interest of completeness, the story must be told. Let the facts be heard, and it will be for those better than I to judge, if judgement is what is sought. Remember, 83 people are dead, and no law in the world can change the fact that they missed dinner that night, they missed seeing their kids grow up, they missed out on the rest of the lives they should have had.
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On this page, I'm going to follow an unusual format: I will present the cases for and against each party as the jury heard it, to the best of my ability after studying the records. As will be seen from the explanations I give, all of these things the lawyers threw out could be believed or dismissed, based on what the individual reader wants to believe happened, to the point where the bottom line is, it doesn't matter. No one was really at fault here, the tragedy just happened.
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Robert Carey (the Pilot of N7374J)
Plenty of the blame, of course, fell squarely on Mr. Carey's shoulders. It makes sense, of course - it's very easy to imagine that all people flying little planes are just making the skies more unsafe for those who have actual business up there. But the FAA's ruling of no-fault was pretty important here, in relieving him of blame. As has been stated here already, he was doing a very good job for a student pilot, and neither he nor the experienced flight crew of the DC-9 saw each other. Because it was found to be no-fault, and because Mr. Carey had so much support on his side that he was a good, conscientious student pilot, made the lawyers have to look elsewhere.
Forth Corporation (Flight School training Mr. Carey)
The flight school at Brookside Airport was a good one. Claude Forth, the owner, spent a good deal of time there, and there was never any reason to think that corners were cut in any aspect of student training for any reason. However, some things stand out as unusual in this incident.
Mr. Carey had received flight training which had adequately prepared him for the task he was attempting to perform on that day. His instructor, Bob Kiesel, no doubt had every confidence in his ability to conduct a safe and well-planned cross country flight. However, as was stated above, the weather on this day was a little suspect. Carey had driven to the airport fully intending to go to Lafayette, and only after several phone calls to Flight Service and some advice from a different flight instructor did he finally decide on Columbus.
Why a different flight instructor? Well, Mr. Kiesel was not at the airport that day. That in itself seems strange, because not many primary flight instructors would allow their students to do any cross-country flying unless they were there to supervise. In fact, it was instructor Rice (the same person who three days earlier had admonished him for flying in worse weather than he should have) who advised Bob against Lafayette, reviewed his updated flight plan, and signed him off for the flight to Columbus.
But it gets a little stranger: After Carey took off, he seems to have been forgotten, as Rice went to take care of some other business, and didn't even notice almost two hours later that he hadn't returned! When the State Policeman showed up at the airport at almost 5:30 to advise the school of the accident involving their own aircraft, Rice thought out loud that, yeah, he guessed Bob hadn't come back yet after all! When I was doing my training, my instructor was on me like a hawk, calling the airports and the Flight Service stations to make sure I was going on schedule, by the book. No such diligent action seemed to have been provided to Bob Carey, who, though he was an advanced student pilot, well capable of flying on his own, was still a student legally and morally requiring diligent instructor oversight in all his aviation activities.
Allegheny Airlines (Operators
of Flight 853)
There was not much to say here. The Allegheny crew had performed their duties that day flawlessly, and could not have done anything to prevent the crash. An argument was made by one of the lawyers that the plane was traveling too fast (under 10000', there is a speed limit of 250kt), but this was not seen as a major contributing factor. Allegheny did recieve its share of the blame, because of this fact, or maybe just because the jury didn't feel right not assigning any blame to them. Really, though, there wasn't much that could have been done. If they'd been going slower, or faster, or if they'd taken on more fuel, or less fuel, or if they hadn't waited for TWA 69 passengers to board, or if they'd turned on their assigned feeder heading a fraction of a second earlier, or.... Who can say what major consequences any of our seemingly minor actions can have somewhere down the line? Is blame to be assigned for all these actions? Who can say?
Most of the fault for the whole situation landed squarely here, with the government as represented by the FAA. Basically, the contention was that the accident happened in an area that was used as a "let-down" for aircraft landing at Indianapolis, and radar coverage had been known by controllers to be inadequate for quite some time. After the crash, several controllers who expressed this fact to newspapers were unofficially punished, some even being removed from duty pending reassignment to other locations.
The argument is simple: If you're going to be slam-dunking big jets in a certain geographic area, at least have the courtesy to make sure your radar can pick up a return from anything in that area bigger than a reasonably good-sized bird. Makes sense, eh? Well, then as now, the wheels of government turned steadily, but slowly, and body counts were often required to be high before someone would get the bright idea to think about doing somthing that should have been a no-brainer in the first place.