You may remember it, almost six years ago (September 26, 1997): Flight 152, a Garuda Indonesia Airlines A300, went through a horrible crash, cartwheeling down a mountainside in Sumatra, Indonesia. All 234 aboard, including two Americans, died.

Chicago's Nolan Law Group figured out a way to have the trial in the US, despite there having been just two Americans aboard the foreign-made plane, flown by foreigners for a foreign airline, that crashed in a foreign country. The money's just too good, from the juries and courts in the USA...

The settlement for 28 victims' families, reached Tuesday, minutes before trial, does not cover the two Americans' deaths.

Sundstrand (now part of Honeywell) is being sued jointly and severally, for everything the lawyers can think of. Sundstrand manufactured the early-1980s-design Mk II GPWS (ground proximity warning system); and plaintiffs claim that some malfunction, or the design itself, caused the crash. In fact, reports say, lawyers say the crash would have been totally avoidable, had the system worked as designed. The more-common theory of the crash (the official investigation hasn't released conclusions; but those well-researched reports are excluded from American court proceedings, as they tend to deflate lawyers' wallets) is that smoke from extensive forest fires obscured visibility, and that some ATC communications with the crew were misunderstood.

The flight left Jakarta, and was headed for Medan. the crash was about eighteen miles short of the destination airport, which had been closed on and off in the preceding days, due to that fire activity.

The confusion in the cockpit was exacerbated by confusion on the ground. 'Left' and 'right' were not clear -- directions to turn one way, were followed by confirmations of turns in the other direction. But, of course, it was all Sundstrand's fault.

FMI: www.honeywell.com