Story ID: 
District Court Rejects Appeal of GARA-related Lawsuit
By: Matt Thurber
Caption: Plaintiffs argued that police aircraft are exempt from GARA statute of repose
Word Count: 982
On September 9, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed the dismissal of a lawsuit in which the plaintiffs asserted that the General Aviation Revitalization Act (GARA) statute of repose didn’t apply after the crash of a Huntington Beach (California) Police Department helicopter.
GARA was signed into law on Aug. 17, 1994, and barred most civil actions against manufacturers of general aviation aircraft and components brought more than 18 years after delivery. In this case, the plaintiffs claimed that the GARA excepted “public aircraft” that are owned or operated by the government. The U.S. District Court for the Central District of California ruled that the GARA did apply in this accident and thus the claim against Boeing was rejected.
The accident involved an MD520N helicopter that was manufactured by Boeing, which held the type certificate that was later sold to MD Helicopters. The helicopter crashed into the water near Newport Beach, killing tactical flight officer Nicholas Vella and injuring officer RJ Garwood, according to the Ninth Circuit decision. “The plaintiffs allege that the crash was caused by a defect in a stability augmentation system that led to a loss of control.”
The NTSB final report found that the stability augmentation system was not faulty, nor did it contribute to the accident, where the pilot was flying “right turns around a ground altercation over an ocean peninsula at night when the helicopter began to spin rapidly to the right.”
The report continued, “The nature of law enforcement flights can result in pilots needing to perform tight-radius, uncoordinated turns in a high-power and low-airspeed regime. Such conditions create an environment where unanticipated right yaw may occur, with a greater susceptibility for a loss of tail rotor effectiveness (LTE) in right turns. Flight operations at low altitude and low airspeed in which the pilot loses situational awareness from the dynamic conditions affecting control of the helicopter are particularly susceptible to this phenomenon. Additionally, the helicopter was equipped with a ducted fan anti-torque system, rather than a conventional tail rotor, which was more susceptible to encountering unanticipated right yaw at higher speeds.
“While the right yaw is usually correctable, the response must be appropriate and rapid, otherwise the condition may quickly increase to a point where recovery is not possible. Additionally, for the accident helicopter model, if aft cyclic was applied during the early recovery phase, the yaw rate can rapidly increase. An effective recovery is also dependent on the pilot’s ability to use external visual references to coordinate corrective control inputs. Due to the night conditions and the helicopter’s proximity to open water, the pilot likely did not have a horizon or accurate external visual reference at the time the helicopter encountered the unanticipated right yaw.
“Although the pilot stated that he immediately applied forward cyclic and full left foot pedal in accordance with the approved recovery technique, the helicopter’s imaging system camera pitched up rapidly at the onset of the spin, indicating that the helicopter likely was in an immediate nose-down attitude. Under these circumstances, with the ground immediately filling the windshield, it is possible that the pilot initially instinctively pulled aft on the cyclic, thereby exacerbating the early stages of the spin. Once the spin had progressed, recovery would have been difficult.”
The NTSB’s probable cause for the accident was: “The helicopter’s encounter with unanticipated right yaw during a low-altitude, low-airspeed, tight-radius orbit. Contributing to the accident was the pilot’s distraction during the orbit, which resulted in the loss of control, his fatigue due to his early wake time and time since awakening, and the lack of external cues that hindered his ability to perform a recovery.”
In the appeal, for which arguments were heard on May 21, the Ninth Circuit court “affirmed the district court’s order dismissing, as barred by the General Aviation Revitalization Act’s statute of repose.”
The argument that the government-operated police helicopter didn’t meet the definition of a general aviation aircraft was not supportable. “The statute defines ‘general aviation aircraft’ based on three specific requirements—and that statutory definition covers the Huntington Beach police helicopter at issue that tragically crashed into the ocean,” the court explained.
“GARA’s statute of repose does not distinguish between civil and public aircraft (i.e., aircraft used or owned by private citizens versus those used or owned by the government). Its text also does not exclude public aircraft from the scope of its purview, let alone use terms such as ‘public’ or ‘civil.’ Rather, GARA defines ‘general aviation aircraft’ based on three specific requirements.”
These include “any aircraft for…which a type certificate or an airworthiness certificate has been issued by the Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration; which, at the time such certificate was originally issued, had a maximum seating capacity of fewer than 20 passengers; and which was not, at the time of the accident, engaged in scheduled passenger-carrying operations as defined under regulations in effect under the Federal Aviation Act of 1958.”
The plaintiffs argued that, according to the court, “‘General aviation aircraft’ is commonly understood to exclude a ‘public aircraft.’ They reference several definitions of ‘general aviation aircraft’ from dictionaries and industry publications. This argument would have more force if GARA had not defined ‘general aviation aircraft.’ But GARA expressly defines ‘general aviation aircraft’ based on three elements…By asking us to rely on dictionary and industry definitions instead of the express statutory definition, the plaintiffs essentially ask us to override the statutory language. That we cannot do.”
“When ‘a statute includes an explicit definition’ of a term, ‘we must follow that definition, even if it varies from a term’s ordinary meaning,’” the court wrote, citing Van Buren v. United States.