Cobalt wrote:
…none of which appear to be relevant to the Evo, which allegedly was sued by the estate of people killed in an accident…
There is the raw and unpainted truth, and there is the official version. It all boils down to the same thing though:
Hey LeSving, so what is the raw and unpainted truth as far as EAC is concerned? Which of the people involved with the company or product have you been talking to in order to get an informed opinion? Can we know?
That mechanism is not exactly new LeSving.
The problem is, that apparently American courts are prone to falling for such things and awarding ridiculous compensations to people who were the cause of the problem in the first place. IMHO that is a wrong approach and it has caused massive problems in the past not only in the airplane industry but generally. I had understood that the abuse of the legal system to extort money out of companies for obvious blunders by consumers incapable of using a product correctly due to either insufficient intellect or with malicious intent had been stopped or at least restricted, but it appears that this is not so.
Well, as long as people get awarded (or at least there is the possibility) runious amounts of money for being stupid, the US industry is as much in jeopardy as it used to be. Maybe if the insurances as one threatened to walk away and refuse to insure ANY manufacturing company, thereby rendering the whole industry bancrupt, lawmakers and judges would wake up.
A company I was involved in was sued for patent infringement in front of some backcountry court in the USA. It costed us $6m and almost broke our neck to defend ourselves. In the end we won the case in court but the money and time were lost for ever.
The legal system of this country is completely broken. You can destroy companies by filing frivolous lawsuits. There is nothing stopping this. The whole court system is just a money game — who can afford more $800/h lawyers for longer, wins. Motion after motion, there is always another move to be made. In the end it goes in front of 12 dumb farmers where all you have to do is paint a simplistic good vs evil (company vs poor widow, American vs foreigner, etc.) picture to convince the simple minds.
achimha wrote:
In the end we won the case in court but the money and time were lost for ever.
That is the crux with it. You win but can’t get your money back because the claimants have gone out of business the day the verdict arrived.
Frivolous lawsuits are a problem everywhere but it appears that in the US the willingness to do so is much higher than elsewhere. Obviously that has to be because chances of success are higher too.
I once talked to a lawyer over there who detested this kind of thing and he told me several attempts to change the laws concerned or to increase hurdles for claimants to sue were screamed down by customer protection lobbyists, who claimed that doing that was an infringement of their rights.
I guess one of the ways of doing something about it would be to cap the claim amounts in liability cases to the actual physical damage done. e.g. a claim against an airplane company could not exceed the billed price of the airplane, to put a cap on the amounts suable for physical damage to people e.t.c. It might not cure the system but it would maybe stop the kazillion game some of those lawyers play.
Also another way of massively reducing such suits would be to ban the practice of lawyers being paid a share if they win, often enough the only payment they would get. If lawyers would be stopped asking massive shares of the compensation given, it would no longer be in their interst to sue companies for insane amounts of money if all they will get is their (already pricely) salary. But if the practice of lawyers encouraging people to sue on success base (often up to 50% of the compensation goes to them) could be stopped and declared unlawful, then a lot of law suits would die before they ever get filed.
Actually in the US, you don’t get your legal expenses covered by the losing party. You can be steamrolled by somebody with deep pockets without any substance to their claim. It’s just a game of $800/h lawyers sending letters to each other until there are no more hours to be billed. Lawyers work on contingency basis (illegal in most European countries) so they actively persuade the widow to sue without any financial risk.
achimha wrote:
Lawyers work on contingency basis (illegal in most European countries) so they actively persuade the widow to sue without any financial risk.
Exactly that is what I mentioned before. It is illegal in most European countries for a good reason and should be illegal anywhere. Would put an end to the “ambulance chasers” business in the first place.
Equally, cover of costs should be awarded to the winning party in such cases, as they are in most other places.
The downside of course is, that in REAL cases only quite wealthy people can sue at all. In Europe it is often financially impossible to sue anyone due to the risk to be settled with full costs if you loose. That is why people are shy to sue even if they have a clear case unless they have an insurance for legal costs. I do have that and it is a very good investment.
to mooney driver:
you can’t be serious when you mention that evolutions will be in museums after factory closes.
I built that airplane, I have blueprints of all parts, i have built composite and metal airplanes, we have a full cnc equipped shop in my hangar with Bridgeport, metal welding, bending and my hangar partner is a machinist with 40 years experience. the engine is a Pratt and Whitney that should last much longer than the engine on your mooney. The electronics are mostly Garmin and serviced by a qualified electronic shop (more in USA all over). Actually there are 5 airplanes in the same hangar, some built in late 1940’s and all flying including Tigermoth, buckers, zlin 50 etc all discontinued and in excellent condition. You mean all those airplanes need to go to museums now that the factories closed?
please be serious
the important thing is that I can go to my airport, quick the tires, pull the evo out, go 1300 miles non stop using 28 gallons/hr at FL 280 and carry full load and fuel with baggage. and I plan to do that for the next 10 years. Deice included. BF Goodrich supported. Try to do that with the mooney, your factory came close to shut down. If it happens are you going to sell yours? or donate it to a museum?
mayarflyer,
I am really hoping that you can keep them going and that you can continue operating them without factory support and a fleet of 80 planes.
Our situation at Mooney was quite different. Even if the company shut doors, there is a huge stockpile of spare parts as well as recovered parts and a great network from which to source them. I can get original parts for my 1965 model without ever going to Mooney as there are plenty of companies who support us, Lasar, Don Maxwell and several others. If I need a replacement landing gear or even a new wing, there are ways to get it. It is quite different if there is a fleet of serveral thousand planes as opposed to 80. Apart the factory never really closed down and provided parts even throughout the time they did not produce airplanes.
How would you deal with a loss of a landing gear or other vital part like windscreen e.t.c. if nobody manufactures a replacement?
I’ve seen Lancair 4’s in museums and heaven knows they are still supported. Off all the Prescott Pushers only one still flies.
Believe me, I do hope that someone takes over Evolution (like it happened with other bancrupt companies like Eclipse) and starts building kits and parts again. They are beautiful planes and I wish you all the best to keep them going.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
How would you deal with a loss of a landing gear or other vital part like windscreen e.t.c. if nobody manufactures a replacement?
For a US Experimental we find somebody who knows how to make drawings or tooling (for example tooling for a plexiglass transparency pulled off the original part), then we find somebody who knows how to make things using those drawings or tooling (e.g. LP, Aircraft Windshield or Cee Bailey for plexiglass) and pretty soon the parts ‘magically’ appear. In all honestly, there at probably 50 planes at my base that get any and all airframe parts by that method. Several of the early homebuilt kits required the landing gear to be manufactured from drawings, it’s not rocket science just diligent work. One of the local guys used to work at a military aircraft rework facility, the heat treatment furnace was never full and to fix that issue it used to get occasional visitors…
The most talented people local to me more recently designed an original design carbon fiber wing for a CAP 231 with a broken OEM wing, built production style tooling and then built the wing themselves on the tooling. It’s much, much nicer than the original plane, completely on another level similar to the best sailplanes or military UAVs. They subsequently considered selling kits to build the whole plane, calling it a Copy-CAP, but instead moved on to other projects – most recently turning a crashed Glasair III into a twin turbo Reno racer, redesigning the wing for the application and developing the whole turbo setup themselves using car turbochargers etc.
So no, parts will not be a problem and nobody will scrap anything. Somebody will rise to the challenge 
