Families Get $57 Million in 1974 Plane Crash Award : Lawsuit: Persistence pays for widows and children. Accident was attributed to faulty design.
They were quiet, unassuming men with a passion for flying, and one Sunday in 1974 it cost them their lives. The light airplane they were contemplating buying lost power in one engine shortly after takeoff from Rialto Airport, spun out of control and crashed.
The deaths of the three passengers, each 45, caused hardships for the families left behind. Neldon Dunaway’s widow, Sandra, struggled to keep his ditch-digging business going. Richard Elsworth’s widow, Doris, went back to work after a lapse of many years and wound up with an ulcer. Mildred Best, widow of Roger and Doris’ sister, had to sell her home. Each was left with a child to rear.
Despite evidence that the plane’s design was defective, it was 11 years before the widows and children received any money from the manufacturer, Beech Aircraft Corp., which battled them all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Even after they collected on their initial lawsuit, however, the passengers’ widows kept fighting. This week their tenacity paid off.
In what may be the largest such judgment ever won by individuals in California, the widows and their children were awarded a total of $57 million in damages Wednesday by a San Mateo County Superior Court jury. The panel found that Beech Aircraft Corp. and its wholly owned insurer acted in bad faith when it refused to try to settle the 1974 lawsuit despite reasonably clear evidence the company had been negligent in its manufacture of the twin-engine Model 95 Travelair.
In addition to compensatory damages, the jury awarded punitive damages of $15 million to each widow and $4 million to each child.
In a statement issued from its Wichita, Kan., headquarters, Beech Aircraft called the verdict “a serious miscarriage of justice.” Noting that the state law on bad-faith lawsuits has changed since the case was filed, the company said it would appeal. The award will be subject to 10% interest pending the appeals process.
The case took so long that Mildred Best died in January, five months before the bad-faith lawsuit got to trial, and the youngest of the children deprived of a father is now 32.
“My sister used to say, ‘I think they’re waiting for us to die,’ ” recalled 62-year-old Doris Santesson--who remarried in 1980--in an interview in Sandra Dunaway’s modest Northridge apartment.
For the families’ attorney, John C. Taylor, this week’s victory was tainted by the knowledge that no such case can ever be brought again. In 1988, the state Supreme Court overturned an earlier ruling that had allowed accident victims to sue the wrongdoer’s insurer if claims were improperly delayed or denied.
Under the previous 1979 decision, insurance companies could be sued “if they failed to attempt to settle when liability becomes reasonably clear,” Taylor said. Under current law, it is up to the state insurance commissioner to enforce laws against unscrupulous actions.
In this case, Taylor said, there was evidence that the Model 95 Travelair, discontinued after 1968, had a defect that gave it “an undue tendency to spin with one engine gone.” Before his clients’ crash, 21 “similar spin accidents” had occurred, resulting in 35 other deaths, according to the attorney.
Taylor also said a military report had been “highly critical” of the aircraft. In 1976, he added, the company revised its manuals to provide information about how to fly the plane safely if an engine were lost.
With this kind of evidence, the lawyer said, the company should have made a serious offer to settle. Instead, in 1979, it offered each family $10,000. In 1980, after an 80-day trial, a Los Angeles Superior Court jury awarded the families of the three passengers and pilot Edward Miro, who also died in the crash, a total of $1.8 million.
They received the money after the appeals process ended in 1985 and filed the bad-faith suit the following year. Dunaway, now 52, and Santesson said some of their friends counseled them to drop the matter.
“I felt we owed it to the guys,” said Santesson, adding that she hoped Beech would now be persuaded to ground the remaining Model 95s.
Beech was able to get the case moved to Redwood City, forcing the widows and their children to stay in hotels during the two-week trial, which began June 10. Dunaway said as a result of her absence from work she lost her job as a receptionist in a dental office. But the women felt their presence was helpful.
“(Jurors) felt we were not the country-club set,” said Santesson. “They saw we were ordinary people with lives like theirs.”
Both women said they were in shock from the size of the award but did not expect their lives to change appreciably. Santesson said she planned to pay off the mortgage on her home in Santa Clarita. Dunaway said she hoped to return to her hometown of Bogalusa, La.
In any case, Dunaway said, there is no way to put a price tag on their loss.
“You’ve lost a husband, you’ve lost a human being who was a very good person. . . . They don’t see their children grow up. They never knew their grandchildren, and the grandchildren never knew them,” she said. “It’s just something that never goes away.”
