Trial Begins in Fatal Crash of Helicopter : Courts: Victim’s family claims manufacturer was negligent. Prominent surgeon was killed when his fuel was cut off.

What caused a helicopter piloted by a prominent Orange County surgeon to crash two years ago is the question confronting jurors in a trial that began Wednesday in Orange County Superior Court.

Dr. Todd L. Passoff died in the crash shortly after lifting off from an Anaheim hospital. His family has sued Robinson Helicopter Co., the Torrance-based manufacturer of the helicopter that the orthopedic surgeon was flying.

Wayne Austero, the lawyer for Passoff’s wife, Elyse, said he will seek to prove that Passoff inadvertently operated a lever shutting off the fuel to the helicopter’s engine, which then stalled in flight, because the lever was placed dangerously close to other levers that are needed to fly the aircraft. The attorney also contended that the safety guard was inadequate.

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But lawyers for the company blamed pilot error for the crash.

“As great a surgeon as he was and as great a human being, he was just an average pilot,” the defense attorney, Allen L. Neelley, told the jury in his opening remarks.

The crash occurred May 8, 1992, just after Passoff left Anaheim Memorial Medical Center, where he had completed a knee joint replacement, en route to a sports medicine clinic he operated in Temecula. Passoff lived in Newport Beach with his wife and two young daughters.

Neelley also said that in the last months before the accident Passoff did not fly the R-22 helicopter frequently enough to maintain proficiency and that he failed to obtain refresher training in executing emergency landings.

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Neelley said in an interview outside the courtroom that just two days before the crash the 43-year-old surgeon had been advised by the chief pilot and president of Helistream Inc.--the Costa Mesa company that taught him to fly the $115,000 helicopter and serviced it--that he needed to bring his emergency training up to date.

Neelley said he will attempt to show that Passoff may have been especially nervous or hurried that morning because he was flying without first obtaining required clearance from the nearby Fullerton Airport control tower and was at an altitude between 150 and 200 feet, lower than the minimum 500 feet that Neeley said is recommended to allow enough room to land safely in an emergency.

Federal safety officials who investigated the crash of the helicopter, which plunged into a sand and gravel operation a mile from Anaheim Memorial, said at the time that the pilot had failed to auto-rotate the chopper blades when the power quit. Auto-rotation is an emergency procedure in which the pilot disengages the main rotor blades from the engine. This helps the blades rotate on their own as the aircraft descends, greatly reducing the speed of the fall.

The first witness called by the Passoff family’s attorney was Jerry Wells, an expert at investigating plane crashes. He testified that the helicopter would have been safer if the fuel mixture control lever, which regulates the flow of fuel from the carburetor to the engine, had been placed in a more remote location in the cockpit.

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Wells said there was no need for the fuel mixture control to be within easy reach of the pilot because the helicopter’s operating manual recommends against adjusting it in flight: “Its only function is to shut off the engine.”

During an investigation of the wreckage, Wells said, he found evidence that the pilot indeed had operated the lever that caused the accident. He said the carburetor was on idle.

Neelley, however, said he knew of no other accidents caused by pilot errors in activating the fuel control on the R-22, which he described as “the largest selling light helicopter in the world,” with about 2,500 aircraft sold since it was certified by the Federal Aviation Administration in 1979. Neelley said that when the wife of a pilot accidentally pulled the fuel mixture control gear in 1981, the company installed a guard on it to prevent such mishaps.

But Wells testified that because the guard is removable it can be easily misplaced or forgotten.