Products liability

MICHAEL MARSH AND DONNIE KING

Akerman

The Akerman team represented French plane maker Daher-Socata and U.S. subsidiary Socata North America along with co-lead counsel Nixon Peabody in a lawsuit blaming a design defect for the crash of a TBM 700/850 that injured the two people aboard.

The single-engine turboprop plane went down at 100 mph at a high school athletic field in Fayetteville, Georgia, in 2014. The plaintiffs sought more than $15 million in damages in Broward Circuit Court, blaming the fuel system for an engine stall while the aircraft was on autopilot.

The defense blamed pilot error by Blaine McCaleb, who was injured along with his wife, Dr. Cynthia McCaleb, arguing the crash could have been avoided if he had flipped a switch. She claimed career-ending brain injuries.

The defense relief on expert testimony and animation. The jury was out for more than a day before delivering a defense verdict in November 2018.

Describe a key piece of testimony, evidence, ruling or order in your case and how it influenced the outcome: Anticipating the jury would have spent almost two weeks digesting conflicting, complicated information about the airplane crash, we strategically saved our piloting expert, William Jeffrey Edwards, as the last witness before closing arguments.

We used sophisticated technology to vividly bring our case and its theme together for the jury. We structured his testimony to sound like a closing argument on pilot error.

Using the data from the integrated flight instrument system and the aircraft audio recordings, experts were able to reconstruct and animate the actual flight. The animation went beyond allowing the jury to see the movement of the aircraft. The jury was also able to see the movement of gauges inside the cockpit and see and hear the 24 alarm bells and warnings that should have notified the pilot that there was a problem.

Using this animation, our last witness took the jury through a simple but very captivating story of the flight and inferior piloting that lead to the crash. We strategically gave ourselves two closings — one before the plaintiff and one after.