In October 1979, almost one year after Alfa Foxtrot 586 went down and just days ahead of a statute of limitations deadline, Loreen Grigsby joined Karen Miller and Guillermo Garcia in their lawsuits against Lockheed, Allison, and Hamilton Standard. A Redwood City, California, attorney, Philip Silvestri, filed the suits on behalf of Grigsby, Miller, Garcia, and the women’s five children. Silvestri was a local lawyer, a graduate of the University of San Francisco and of the university’s school of law.
From Redwood City, Moffett Field was just a short drive south on the Bayshore Freeway. During any one of the area’s crystalline days and from almost any vantage point in the small city where Silvestri practiced, a keen eye could have seen Navy P-3s departing north from Moffett or, less commonly, landing south over San Francisco Bay, just by glancing up. The familiar turboprops would have stood out clearly from the swept-wing, jet transport traffic swarming around the busy civil airports at San Francisco, Oakland, and San José that surrounded the naval air station.
Two bereaved widows and five fatherless children. A father without his son. A front-page story of loss that everyone around the Bay still remembered. A recent history of five fatal P-3 crashes spanning more than half the globe, from the Canary Islands to the Philippines (the flaming disaster at Pago Pago was still six months in the future). Prosperous corporate defendants. The cases must have seemed naturals, even though the damages that could be awarded would be very small.
The law governing such cases was the Death on the High Seas Act (DOHSA), passed by Congress in 1920 to make it possible for sailors’ immediate families to recover damages if their breadwinners died in international waters. Although DOHSA provided heirs with means of obtaining relief for lost support, it was hardly generous. In 1979, as it had in 1920, the law sharply limited claims to actual financial loss, that is, the future income of the wage earner. In the AF 586 suits, DOHSA’s miserly arithmetic would begin with Grigsby’s, Miller’s, and Garcia’s pay and allowances in October 1978 and calculate future earnings over the course of what would have been their normal working lives. The burden of proof, naturally, was on the families to present evidence of defects that caused the crash.
In response to Silvestri’s filings, the corporate defendants would rely on the powerful “military contractors defense.” This legal doctrine was based on the premise that military aircraft specifications should not be subject to legal review because the government may rightfully value combat efficiency more highly than safety and consequently approve designs that traded the latter for the former. The military contractors defense provided that the P-3’s contractors would not be liable for design defects, if they could demonstrate that their government customer had provided precise specifications for the P-3, that the airplane conformed to these specifications, and that the Navy had been informed of any hazards in operating aircraft systems that otherwise might have been unknown to it.
That is how things stood through 1980 and into 1981, as the legal actions inched slowly forward while lawyers on both sides exchanged correspondence: one side looking to the slim comforts of the Death on the High Seas Act, the other brandishing the familiar military contractors defense.
It is difficult to predict the outcome had the lawsuits made it to federal district court, but executives at Hamilton Standard and United Technologies (Hamilton Standard’s corporate parent) must have known that they were vulnerable. The loss of PD-2 was not an act of God. It began with a mechanical failure in the prop that had been experienced before and studied carefully enough to have resulted in redesign of a deficient part critically important to the control of propeller rpm.
Robert Masden and George Nesky, Hamilton Standard’s technical representatives, had not given Jim Dvorak a sworn statement about the likely nature of the failure inside of AF 586’s no. 1 nacelle, but they had spoken candidly to him. The rapid loss of prop control and the resulting overspeed were symptomatic, the two said, of the failure of the Babbit transfer bearing in the propeller control. Masden and Nesky believed that this bearing failure had caused PD-2’s no. 1 prop overspeed. The failure, they had explained to Dvorak while he took careful notes, had “considerable historical precedent,” meaning that it had happened a number of times in the past. So often, in fact, that a fix had been approved for use, the smaller diameter O-rings that Powers and Prindle had heatedly argued about months earlier.
Those new O-rings were not installed in PD-2.
Matt Gibbons had a complete copy of Jim Dvorak’s investigation, which he had gotten as a “souvenir” from Pat Conway. Gibbons’s copy included the full text of Masden’s and Nesky’s unsworn statement. (The heavily edited version of the investigation the three contractors had was much less revealing and less damning.) Confronted unexpectedly with Gibbons’s version during a deposition conference in late spring 1981, the defense yielded. Allison’s counsel led the defendants to their decision to offer an out-of-court settlement.
But what DOHSA gave it also took away. The fact that AF 586 sank in international waters deprived the three families of an opportunity for financial recovery more representative of their losses. Together, they were able to collect only several hundred thousand dollars, a sum probably below the deductible in Hamilton Standard’s liability insurance policy. An amount so trivial as not to warrant even a footnote in anyone’s annual report.