Sikorsky CH-148 Helicopter
PHILADELPHIA - It's unclear how much the families of six Canadian Armed Forces members who died in a helicopter crash near Greece will receive in a recent settlement, but they say it's more than if they had taken their case north.
Rather than sue in Canada, they did in Philadelphia federal court in 2023. The defendant was the helicopter's American manufacturer, Sikorsky Aircraft of Connecticut. The subsidiary of Lockheed Martin was charged with failing to identify a design flaw in the CH-148 maritime helicopter.
That led to a 2020 crash into the Ionian Sea when the electronic flight system assumed control of the aircraft. The helicopters were made and testing at a now-closed facility in Pennsylvania.
Killed were Matthew Cousins, Abbigail Cowbrough, Kevin Hagen, Brenden MacDonald, Maxime Miron-Morin and Matthew Pyke, whose estates were all in Nova Scotia.
They and lawyers at Raynes & Lawn filed a petition for approval of a settlement on June 30. The firm will take one-third of the confidential settlement after beating back efforts from Sikorsky to dismiss or transfer the case.
"Plaintiffs demonstrated the deep connection between the incident CH-148 and Pennsylvania and established the significant limitations on discovery and document production in Canada that kept this case in the United States and in Pennsylvania," the plaintiffs wrote.
"Had the case been litigation in Nova Scotia, as the Sikorsky Defendants argued, the damages available to the plaintiffs would have been a fraction of the amount they were able to recover through this settlement."
Three of those killed were married, and the plaintiffs say there would only have been about $60,000 available for non-economic damages. Their children would have recovered only about $50,000, they add.
Canada would have taxed the recovery too, they argued. And if Sikorsky had been successful in getting the case in Connecticut federal court, the judge could have stopped their additional claims under the Pennsylvania Survival statute.
"Unlike Pennsylvania, Connecticut does not recognize a statutory survival claim in connection with wrongful death," the plaintiffs said. "Rather, the damages suffered by a decedent before his or her death are among the damages to be awarded under Connecticut's wrongful death statute."
Had they not connected the helicopter to Pennsylvania, "the damages outlook for plaintiffs would have been starkly different."
When Canada’s Department of National Defense was looking to secure a new military helicopter fleet in the 1990’s, Sikorsky attempted to secure its business by offering an electronic flight control system – despite the fact that such a system had never before been utilized in a military helicopter and it had never been certified by the Federal Aviation Administration, the suit says.
According to the lawsuit, Sikorsky analyzed the flight data from the April 2020 crash and determined the electronic flight control system would overtake manual control of the helicopter when pilots were making “significant pedal and cyclic inputs” while operating in autopilot mode, as the decedents were on the day of the crash.
Specifically, the decedents were performing a low-altitude maneuver commonly used during rescue or combat and believed they would be able to override the electronic flight control system without disabling it, if necessary.
But that was not to be, and the suit alleges that Sikorsky violated industry standards and practices by failing to create a warning system for such an event and failing to design the flight director, so that it would automatically disengage if the pilots went beyond what the company tested for.
