Lockheed Martin sued over fatal chopper crash

The widow of a deceased Army helicopter crew chief is suing Lockheed Martin’s Sikorsky Aircraft Corp., the maker of the Black Hawk helicopter, alleging a defective tail rotor system caused her husband’s helicopter to spin out of control and crash into a Maryland golf course last year, killing him and critically injuring two others.

The lawsuit, which was filed Monday in Bridgeport, Conn., called into question the safety of a widely used U.S. military helicopter. Plaintiffs accused Sikorksy Aircraft, a Stratford, Conn.-based helicopter manufacturer that was bought by Lockheed Martin in 2015, of product liability, negligence and wrongful death in connection with Jeremy Tomlin’s death, saying that the helicopter’s component parts were “unfit, unsafe, unairworthy and defective.” The suit seeks unspecified damages.

Lockheed Martin has a facility in Marietta with about 5,000 employees.

A Lockheed Martin spokesman said the company does not comment on pending litigation. Timothy Loranger, an attorney representing the plaintiffs, said the problem could have been discovered only by the manufacturer.

“That flaw could not be detected by the Army, or the pilots or anyone operating the aircraft,” he said. “It was a ticking time bomb situation.”

The suit stems from an April 17, 2017 incident in which a UH60 Black Hawk helicopter crashed into a tree at the Brenton Bay Golf Course in Leonardtown, Md., killing Tomlin and injuring two pilots who were aboard, Terikazu Onada and Christopher Nicholas. The suit was brought by the two surviving pilots, their wives and the widow of Tomlin. Nicholas and Onada suffered “lifelong, debilitating injuries,” an attor-

ney representing them said.

The Army’s investigation found that an important internal laminate skin that bonds parts of the rotor system together had disintegrated, causing part of the vehicle’s tail rotor system to fall off mid-flight. It stopped short of determining why the laminate had disintegrated or who might be at fault for what it termed a “material defect.”

But plaintiffs said the material defect could have resulted only from negligence on the part of Sikorsky, which is ultimately responsible for ensuring the vehicles it sells to the Army are mission-worthy.

“Defendants knew for years that the aircraft posed a high risk of failure if not adequately monitored, inspected, designed, manufactured overhauled, assembled, sold, reconditioned or certified properly, and that such catastrophic failure could lead to a loss of pilot control,” plaintiffs alleged in the legal complaint.

Franklin Turner, an attorney with the law firm McCarter & English who is not involved in the case and has previously represented Sikorsky, said the plaintiffs would probably need to offer further evidence to prove that some failure on the part of Sikorsky had caused the rotor to fail.

“These are kitchen-sink allegations that are commonly levied in product liability cases, but which on their face appear to lack the specific causal nexis explaining what exactly it was that the company did incorrectly that resulted in the crash,” Turner said. “Purely based on the complaint, there would have to be more to connect the harm that occurred here to Sikorsky itself.”