Birmingham attorney Jim Thompson was the lead attorney in a lawsuit filed on behalf of the Davey Allison estate that claimed a flawed part called a collective yoke – not pilot error as the National Transportation Safety Board ruled – caused the July 1993 crash at Talladega Superspeedway that took Allison’s life and injured his Hueytown neighbor, Red Farmer. McDonnell-Douglas, the California-based aircraft manufacturer that owns Hughes Aircraft, which built the helicopter, settled the suit for an undisclosed sum in 1996 without admitting fault. “We deny that any defective condition contributed to the accident,” George S. McCall, the attorney for McDonnell-Douglas, said last week. Both McCall and Thompson say they are prohibited by the court to discuss the settlement in the case. Both the Allison estate and Farmer were part of that settlement. Thompson, who has tried numerous air-crash cases, said he has declined numerous cases when it was evident that pilot error was the cause. He said he agreed to take the Allison case after his investigation concluded that a failed part caused Allison’s accident. “Tommy Allison (Davey’s cousin and the executor of the Allison estate) said that he couldn’t believe Davey made a mistake, because he was such an excellent pilot,” said Thompson, outlining what triggered the investigation and finally the lawsuit. “He said Davey was accustomed to running 200 mph. He said Davey didn’t make a mistake at 10 mph.” The NTSB ruled in 1994 that pilot inexperience was the cause of the crash. The report said Allison had just 2.8 hours of flight instruction on the Hughes 369HS helicopter and had not practiced downwind landings like the one he was attempting in the media center parking lot of the race track infield. The report said Allison had 54 hours of helicopter flight time at the time of the crash, but 45 of those hours were in a less-demanding Robinson R-22 helicopter. A flight instructor who trained Allison testified before the board that Allison had “average” flight skills and tended to make his approaches too fast and too shallow as a result of having trained on the smaller and slower Robinson R-22. Witnesses to the crash said Allison was hovering just a few feet off the ground when the helicopter suddenly shot straight up, stalled and fell back on its tail. When the main rotor struck the asphalt, the helicopter spun and the left side of the cockpit slammed onto the parking lot. Allison suffered fatal head injuries when his head struck either the inside of the cockpit or the asphalt. The eyewitness accounts pointed to something failing in the control apparatus of the helicopter, Thompson said. Investigators hired by Thompson dismantled the helicopter and found that the collective yoke, the device that controls the pitch of the rotor blades, was broken. “We knew McDonnell-Douglas would argue that it was broken in the crash,” Thompson said. “The helicopter wasn’t that badly damaged in the crash and the yoke was located between the seats in an area that had no damage at all. The cables going to the yoke and hydraulic lines in the area showed no signs of damage.” Thompson said he hired a retired Hughes Aircraft test pilot to recreate a failure of the yoke. With a back-up system in place to prevent a crash, the yoke was disconnected, Thompson said. “The helicopter did exactly what Davey’s did,” Thompson said. The broken part was sent to a metallurgist in Florida. He testified that a dissection of the part found that the cast metal contained air pockets that made it fail, according to Thompson. Paint like that found on the outside of the yoke was found inside the part during dissection, he said. “That meant the part was defective the day it left the factory,” Thompson said. The attorney believes metal fatigue finally caused the part to fracture and that occurred just as Allison was about to put the helicopter down.( Alabama Live )(9-23-2003)
