Lawyers Had Said The Report Would Be 'Irreparably Harmful' To A Plaintiff In A Wrongful Death Suit

A Philadelphia law firm has been unsuccessful in an attempt to have an NTSB probable cause report pulled from its website for 30 days.

The report is from an accident which occurred on March 13, 2005. Three people were fatally injured when the Grumman AA-5 they were aboard went down at Ohio's Lawrence County Air Park. The firm argued that the information in the NTSB report would be "irreparably harmful" to the plaintiffs in the case. They had alleged that the NTSB's "brief" investigation into the accident arrived at incorrect conclusions because the engine manufacturer had been asked to participate in the probe, and the Board had ignored eyewitness accounts of an engine malfunction prior to the plane going down.

Jurors in the wrongful death trial concluded that the engine manufacturer did not negligently design a muffler for the engine and did not fail to warn about dangers associated with that muffler.

The legal journal The Pennsylvania Record reports that, according to court documents, the request for a temporary restraining order was thrown out by Eastern District Court Judge Lawrence F. Stengel on May 6th, and the plaintiffs withdrew their litigation five days later.

The NTSB determined that the probable cause of the accident was the "pilot's failure to maintain airspeed during the aborted landing, which resulted in an inadvertent stall."

FMI: http://www.ntsb.gov/_layouts/ntsb.aviation/brief.aspx?ev_id=20050322X00347&key=1