Gary C. Robb

At 6:25 a.m. on May 27, 1993, James Barnett Jr. radioed Life Flight 2’s position over Cameron, Missouri. He was flying Sherry Ann Letz, 20, from the hospital in Bethany to St. Luke’s Hospital in Kansas City. Soon afterward the nurse on board heard a loud pop or bang in the engine. Barnett carried the helicopter some seventy feet past a stand of sixty-foot trees, and within ten to fifteen seconds of the engine’s failure it was down in a DeKalb County cornfield. Letz and Barnett were killed.

The engine had run 2,482 hours since its last overhaul. In May 1988 its French manufacturer, Turbomeca S.A., had lengthened the interval between overhauls from 2,000 to 2,500 hours, despite its knowledge of in-flight failures caused by cracking in the part that failed that morning. Reviewing the case in 1997, the Missouri Court of Appeals wrote that “had Turbomeca not extended the time between overhauls from 2000 to 2500, the accident in this case would have never occurred.”

Gary C. Robb tried both wrongful-death cases that came out of that crash in Jackson County in 1995. In April a jury found for the family of the patient, Sherry Letz; in July a second jury found for the family of the pilot. In a strict products-liability case, Missouri permits punitive damages only on proof that the manufacturer put the product into commerce with actual knowledge of the defect and showed complete indifference to or conscious disregard for the safety of others. Robb assembled that proof from Turbomeca’s engineering reports, its service letters to helicopter owners, and the testimony of its own officers. The Western District of the Missouri Court of Appeals held that the evidence supported the punitive claims in both cases, and by October 1998 Turbomeca had exhausted its appeals.

Life Flight 2 and the TU 76 Nozzle Guide Vane

Sherry Letz was the mother of two young boys, Eric and Christopher, and the only daughter of Jodie Letz. Early that morning she had been hurt in a motor-vehicle accident. At Harrison County Community Hospital in Bethany she was resuscitated and treated for a collapsed lung, a broken left arm and a concussion, and because the hospital lacked the equipment and specialists she needed, her physician ordered her moved by helicopter to St. Luke’s. Life Flight 2 was a single-engine helicopter powered by a Turbomeca Arriel 1B. The two medical crew members aboard were seriously injured in the crash. Medical experts testified at trial that she would have survived the injuries from the wreck.

Barnett was 40 and had flown full time for Life Flight for eight years. He had logged 4,970 flight hours, 1,400 of them in the military. He had been married for fifteen years to Julia Barnett, whom he met during overseas military service, and they had two children, Jessie, 14, and Mia, 12. The crash transected his thoracic aorta, and he bled to death in the helicopter within three to five minutes.

The engine stopped because its TU 76 nozzle guide vane had cracked. The vane directs gas flow between turbine stages, and cracks in its hub can cost an engine part or all of its power. Turbomeca had substituted the modified TU 76 for an earlier design in the early 1980s, the Barnett court found, “in order to gain a cost savings in production.” The company learned of the cracking after an in-flight engine failure in the Congo in 1985, and in January 1986 it reported the problem to France’s civil aviation authority. That information, the court found, “was not given to the F.A.A., or other owners.”

By November 1990 French authorities had certified two redesigned parts, and in February 1991 the replacements became available to the 2,850 owners around the world whose engines carried the TU 76. Turbomeca announced no general recall. Its first notice to owners outside France, a service letter in March 1991, told them to remove the part if it had been making a loud rubbing noise; the letter mentioned neither the cracking nor the in-flight failures. Turbomeca’s policy was to replace the TU 76 when an engine came in for routine overhaul, at the owner’s cost—the same overhaul whose interval it had lengthened in 1988. Dennis Nichols, president of Turbomeca Engine Corporation, the American subsidiary that installed the TU 76 in Life Flight 2’s engine in June 1989, acknowledged that Turbomeca saved up to $48 million by not immediately recalling the engines. A replacement cost about $17,000 an engine.

Steven Ives, Turbomeca Engine Corporation’s technical services manager, admitted to thirteen accidents or forced landings around the world caused by the TU 76 before Life Flight 2 went down. Turbomeca had reported six to the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board.

“Listen a Little Harder”

The Letz case was tried first, over four weeks in the spring of 1995, against Turbomeca and its American subsidiary. Forty-five witnesses testified in person or by deposition, and 431 exhibits were admitted. Turbomeca’s trial lawyer, Douglas N. Ghertner, argued that the engine part had not caused the crash and that the helicopter’s owner, Rocky Mountain Helicopters, was to blame for not maintaining it properly. Only 6 percent of the vanes pulled for overhaul or inspection had been found cracked, he said, and since June 1992 Turbomeca had been supplying the new part free. The National Transportation Safety Board had already found that the defective vane caused the crash and that Rocky Mountain was not to blame.

Robb answered with Turbomeca’s own history. The jury saw a chart of seven helicopter failures and crashes caused by the part between 1985 and May 1990, by which time a redesigned part existed, and eight more after that date. It heard that the company had known of the defect since 1986 and had told the French military about it. Alain Calemard, Turbomeca’s vice-president for engineering, testified that the company’s commercial department had blocked the modification for an undetermined time. Operators got service letters instead: one in March 1991 asked them to check every day for a rubbing noise in the gas generator, and another in December 1992 reminded them to pay attention to any abnormal noise as the engine stopped. Robb argued: “Send out paper instead of fixing the problem. The first service letter said, ‘Listen.’ The second said, ‘Listen a little harder.’”

On April 13, 1995, after four hours of deliberation, the jury returned a unanimous verdict for the Letz family, assessing 80 percent against Turbomeca S.A. and 20 percent against Turbomeca Engine Corporation. One juror, Raymond Pichardo Jr. of Kansas City, said the jury had meant in part to push the French company to correct the problem in helicopters all over the world. “We wanted to make a statement,” he said. “When you’ve got a dangerous product and there’s something wrong with it, you fix it.” “I feel like justice was done, but it’s never going to bring my daughter back,” Jodie Letz said.

Headlines in Paris

The Barnett case went to trial in June 1995 before a second Jackson County jury. Ghertner again blamed Rocky Mountain. “Engine failure does not mean crash,” he argued. Robb pointed the jurors to a memo in evidence in which a Turbomeca official told an expert to find some way to blame Rocky Mountain, and he reminded them of the videotape they had watched of Barnett dancing and laughing with his wife and children.

In his closing argument Robb told the jurors: “You need to send a message so loud and so clear and so strong that it makes the headlines in Paris.” He went on: “Let the bell toll from this courthouse all over the world. Some people care about human life.”

In July 1995 the jury found for Julia Barnett, the two children and Barnett’s parents, and awarded both actual and punitive damages. “We can’t bring Jim back, but maybe we can prevent it from happening again,” said the foreman, David Babcock. In the hallway after the verdict another juror said that many more people could die in the defective helicopters. “They’re still up there,” she said. Julia Barnett said: “I don’t want people to die anymore. They must fix it.”

Testimony in the Words of the Punitive Instruction

In 1998 Robb described how the Turbomeca records were built, in an article for Missouri Lawyers Weekly titled “Punitive Damages After Letz and Barnett.” Its sections run from the legal standards through a clear product defect, corporate recklessness, economic and profit motive, “safe design” customers, fraudulent representations, and continued production. “Prior similar product failures are essential to proving this element of the punitives case,” he wrote of recklessness. Throughout discovery, he wrote, “constant emphasis was placed on Turbomeca’s ‘conscious’ and ‘knowledge based’ decision-making,” and those terms ran through the numerous videotaped depositions played at trial. “By using the precise language of the punitive elements, the testimony is rendered more incriminating and supportive of the punitives claim,” he wrote. “We found out in discovery that chief executives in the French company had known for over eight years that the engine was defective,” he said that year.

Jean Meliet, Turbomeca’s customer technical support manager, was asked: “You know anybody within your company, Turbomeca, whoever expressed a concern that due to the TU-76 experience that we’d better recall this because someone is going to get hurt or maybe killed?” He answered: “No.” He testified that “Safety, as far as Turbomeca was concerned, was not directly related to the cracks in the TU-76.” He also said: “The in-flight deterioration of a TU 76 leads only to an in-flight shutdown of the engine. That’s all.” Albert Ducrocq, vice president of the company’s airworthiness department, conceded that “[t]he TU-76 doesn’t achieve what we would want as a goal for [a] reliable part.”

The “safe design” customers were the French armed forces. Turbomeca warned the French military of problems with the engine type in December 1985 and in early 1991 retrofitted every French military helicopter engine with the new design, Robb wrote, and no TU 76 in-flight failure or crash was ever reported in a French military helicopter. Calemard testified at trial: “Only the French military was advised of the existence of the Replacement part.” Owners elsewhere received the service letters. “That Turbomeca would selectively recall and retrofit all defective engines in use by the French military and no one else proved its insouciance for the safety of any other world-wide user of its engine product,” Robb wrote.

What the Western District Found in Turbomeca’s Files

Turbomeca appealed both judgments, and on November 25, 1997, ten judges of the Western District and a senior judge decided the two appeals. Writing for a unanimous court in Letz, Chief Judge Ulrich held that substantial evidence established that both Turbomeca companies had actual knowledge of the TU 76’s defective condition when it was installed in Life Flight 2 in June 1989. Turbomeca argued that the $48 million figure was speculative, lacked foundation, and was an improper measure of wrongful-death damages. The court held the evidence properly admitted: Nichols had accepted both the approximate $17,000 cost and the count of 2,850 engines that needed the change, his testimony went directly to the companies’ motive for not repairing the part, and the savings, whether $48 million or a substantial portion of that sum, bore on the aggravating circumstances of Sherry Letz’s death, which were properly before the jury. The court also upheld the admission of Turbomeca’s post-crash reports to the FAA listing earlier TU 76 accidents, as evidence of what the company knew.

Judge Lowenstein’s opinion in Barnett, issued the same day, traced the testimony of Turbomeca’s officers year by year. Turbomeca argued that its internal reports and the evidence of other crashes should have been excluded; the court held them admissible to show both the danger of the part and the company’s actual knowledge. On the company’s reliance on pilots to bring a helicopter down by autorotation after a power loss, the court wrote: “Turbomeca’s reliance on experienced pilots being able to autorotate to a forced landing in such unexpected emergency situations as loss of power, with such a cargo, is void of any support and totally unrealistic.” It noted that installing the replacement part would have taken “but two hours of a mechanic’s time.”

The court also described a meeting at Turbomeca’s home office in the summer of 1994, prompted by this crash and two more failures that year, “to ask ourselves, why does this keep happening,” after which the company again decided against a recall. Asked whether anyone at that meeting had voiced regret that the TU 76 had not been removed sooner, Ducrocq answered: “Not that I remember.” The court found Turbomeca’s reprehensibility “unparallelled, considering that Turbomeca knew the TU-76 was defective,” had discussed the failures internally, and had not told owners about the in-flight failures, notified the FAA, or recalled the part.

Turbomeca asked the Supreme Court of Missouri to take both cases. The court declined to take Barnett, took Letz in March 1998, and in September sent it back to the Western District, which readopted its opinion and issued its mandate on September 30. On October 5, 1998, the Supreme Court of the United States denied Turbomeca’s petition for certiorari in Barnett. By mid-October the Barnett judgment, $40.5 million with interest, had been paid, and the Letz judgment, $41.5 million, was to be paid later that month. “The families of these victims are gratified that the appellate courts have agreed with both juries that Turbomeca’s reckless conduct was truly unparalleled in its reprehensibility,” Robb said. Both families, he said, were setting up charitable foundations in memory of Sherry Letz and James Barnett.

Robb also said: “They recalled and replaced the defective engine for all helicopters in use in the French military, but concealed the danger from all other world-wide aviation authorities and allowed helicopter users around the world to continue to use this deadly engine.” Later that year he wrote: “Defendants continue to represent to the FAA and to world-wide operators that TU 76 is a safe and airworthy part and they have no current or future plans for recalling TU 76.”

Automobile Cases First

Robb came to the law through the debate team at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. “If I could make my living doing something like that, it would be great,” he has recalled. “I enjoyed the research part of it, the speaking, the argumentation.” He earned a bachelor’s degree with distinction and a master’s degree in economics at UMKC in 1977 and 1978, and a law degree cum laude from the University of Michigan in 1981.

In 1984 he and Anita Porte Robb, his wife and law partner, founded Robb & Robb in Kansas City, and he became general editor of the Missouri Products Liability Handbook, a post he has held since. Their first cases concerned alleged defects in automobiles; over the next decade other lawyers began referring them aviation cases, which gradually became the center of the practice. “When a helicopter engine or critical system or component fails, it goes one way quickly—straight down,” Robb said in 2007. He later wrote Helicopter Crash Litigation, now in its third edition, co-chaired the aviation committee of the American Bar Association’s Section of Litigation from 1996 to 1999, served as president of the Missouri Association of Trial Attorneys in 2004, and chaired the American Association for Justice’s aviation section in 2007.

“As in any plaintiff’s practice, you must select your cases carefully because the one finite thing all of us have is our time,” Robb has said. “No lawyer should accept a case unless she is willing to go to trial,” he has also said, because “a trial is the leverage—or stick—we have against the insurance companies and the defendants.”

Fifty-Two Seconds Over Sullivan

On July 29, 2006, a de Havilland DHC-6 Twin Otter took off from Sullivan Regional Airport, about 70 miles southwest of St. Louis, with eight people aboard for a skydiving flight. Shortly after takeoff its right engine, a Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6A-20, failed; witnesses saw smoke and flames. The 39-year-old airplane descended, struck a utility pole and came down nose-first in a tree near a house. Six people died and two survived with injuries, and five of the dead passengers’ families sued.

Victoria Delacroix, 22, of London, a counselor at a Dittmer summer camp for disabled children, was making her first jump; she lived for three days after the crash. Melissa Berridge, 38, of Maryland Heights, was a staff member on Senator Claire McCaskill’s election campaign. Robert Cook, 22, of Laquey, was a senior civil engineering student at the University of Missouri at Rolla and had completed 1,700 jumps. Rob Walsh, 44, of University City, a freelance photographer and certified skydiving instructor, had made more than 5,000. Scott Cowan, 42, of Sullivan, a pilot for American Eagle Airlines and co-owner of Quantum Leap Skydiving, was flying the plane.

The right engine failed when a compressor turbine blade broke. Doncasters had made the blades as aftermarket replacements for Pratt & Whitney Canada’s own and sold them in 1996. Pratt & Whitney Canada built its blades from the alloy Inconel-718 with a pack-aluminide coating to resist oxidation. Doncasters used Inconel-738 and a coating called SermaLoy J; the families’ experts testified that the coating was prone to cracking and the alloy had low oxidation resistance. A replacement blade had to pass a 150-hour endurance test to receive FAA certification, and Doncasters’ blades were run twice in a PT6A-20 before they were sold. The first test was stopped at 142 hours when blades failed, the second at 113.5 hours because the blades had stretched too far. The families also contended that Doncasters sold the part for half its normal cost.

Robb tried the case for the families in Franklin County in April 2011. A forensic expert, Dr. Carlos Diaz, testified that the five experienced pre-impact terror, which he described as “a set of sensations, feelings, and emotions a person experiences when that person feels that death is imminent,” for fifty-two seconds before the plane hit the ground, and that the terror was “horrific.” Before trial Doncasters had produced more than 8,000 documents late. The trial judge found the prejudice to the families “grave and manifest” and split the trial as a sanction: in the first phase, on liability and compensatory damages, Doncasters could not use the late documents unless the families introduced them; in the second, on punitive damages, it could. In that second phase William R. Twa, testifying for the families on FAA regulations, told the jury that Doncasters had not followed the FAA’s rules for the part. The judge also excluded evidence that the FAA had certified the blades, which Doncasters offered as proof that they were not defective.

On April 29, 2011, the jury awarded $4 million for each of the five deaths and $28 million in punitive damages, $5.6 million per claim. After the verdict Robb said, “It was all an effort to sacrifice safety for profit.” Of the punitive award he said, “This company just doesn’t get it and that’s why this jury had to punish them.” “As a result of this verdict, we hope that the company will immediately take this defective part off the market,” he said.

When Doncasters Knew

The trial court entered judgment on the $20 million in compensatory damages and then granted Doncasters judgment notwithstanding the verdict on punitive damages, ruling that the families had not produced clear and convincing evidence that the company actually knew of the defect when it sold the blades. That was Doncasters’ strongest ground. Its corporate representative testified that the company learned of problems in the “2001 time frame,” five years after the sale, and Doncasters argued that the families’ experts had described only what it should have known.

Doncasters appealed the compensatory judgment on nine points, and Robb and Anita Porte Robb cross-appealed for the families on the punitive award. In May 2013 the Missouri Court of Appeals, Eastern District, sitting en banc, reversed the judgment notwithstanding the verdict by a vote of nine to three, in an opinion by Judge Glenn A. Norton. The majority pointed to Donald Sommer, the families’ engine-failure analyst, who testified that the blades were “never successfully tested in the model of engine it was designated for” and was asked whether the results of the failed endurance tests were “clearly and unequivocally known to Doncasters and all of its predecessor companies.” He answered: “Absolutely. That’s where we obtained the documents.” A second expert, Dr. David Hoeppner, called the company’s conduct reckless and testified, “I have never in my career seen anything like this.” Doncasters’ own representative agreed that a company that sells a product it knows to be defective “is acting recklessly.” Viewing that evidence in the light most favorable to the verdict, the majority held that a reasonable juror could find with convincing clarity that Doncasters knew the blades were defective when it sold them and showed complete indifference to or conscious disregard for the safety of others. Judge Clifford H. Ahrens dissented on the punitive question, reasoning that the experts had offered speculation about what Doncasters should have known.

Doncasters had also attacked the compensatory awards. Missouri’s wrongful-death statute, section 537.090, limits a decedent’s own damages to those suffered “between the time of injury and the time of death,” and Doncasters argued that the injuries began at impact, which left the fifty-two seconds before it outside the statute. The court held that there was substantial evidence that the decedents’ “injuries occurred prior to the impact of the crash, at the time the right engine failed,” and that pre-impact terror experienced before an impending aircraft crash is compensable. It affirmed the $20 million in compensatory damages, upheld the discovery sanction as just, and sent the case back with instructions to enter judgment on the jury’s $28 million punitive verdict.

By the end of October 2013 the parties had settled for $52.5 million, $10.5 million for each of the five deaths, funded by Doncasters. The payment covered the $20 million in compensatory damages, the jury’s $28 million punitive award and $4.5 million in interest. Afterward the Robbs said they had learned from people in the industry that Doncasters had taken the blade off the market. “That perhaps, was most gratifying to the clients,” Robb said. “To know that another family was not going to have to suffer what they had been through.”

The Fuel Tank at Frisco

On July 3, 2015, a Flight For Life helicopter, an Airbus AS350 B3e, took off from a hospital in Frisco, Colorado, and crashed in a parking lot moments later. It caught fire on impact. The pilot, Patrick Mahany, was killed. A flight nurse, David Repsher, was burned over about 90 percent of his body, some of the burns reaching bone. Doctors did not expect him to live through the first 24 hours. He spent 13 months in the hospital, went through hundreds of procedures and surgeries, and had to learn again to swallow, eat, speak, roll over, stand and walk.

“The impact forces of this accident were survivable for the helicopter occupants,” the National Transportation Safety Board found. A ruptured fuel tank fed the fire, and the board concluded that the lack of a crash-resistant fuel system contributed to the severity of Repsher’s injuries. Robb pointed to the board’s data: as of November 2014, only about 15 percent of the domestically registered helicopters built after 1994 had such a system.

Robb represented Repsher and his wife, Amanda, in their suit against Airbus Helicopters and the operator, Air Methods. They alleged that the helicopter lacked a crash-resistant fuel system, which had been required on newly certified helicopters since 1994, and that an aftermarket seat Air Methods had installed was not anchored well enough and was thrown from the aircraft in the crash. In February 2018, weeks before a trial set for March 5 in Breckenridge, the companies agreed to pay $100 million, about $55 million from Airbus and about $45 million from Air Methods. The Repshers wanted every helicopter to carry a crash-resistant fuel system “as standard equipment,” Robb said, and Air Methods said it was retrofitting its AS350 and EC130 fleet.

In October 2018 Congress passed an FAA reauthorization bill directing the agency to require, within 18 months, that all new helicopters be built with crash-resistant fuel systems, and to speed certification of retrofit kits for helicopters already flying. “There’s been resistance in the industry to install the crash-resistant fuel systems,” Anita Porte Robb said in 2021. “We are very proud to have played a small part in the bringing about of that fuel-safety technology,” Gary Robb said in 2024.

Vanessa Bryant’s Suit Against Island Express

On January 26, 2020, a 1991 Sikorsky S-76B flying to a youth basketball game at the Mamba Sports Academy in Thousand Oaks crashed into a hillside near Las Virgenes Road in Calabasas amid dense fog at 9:45 a.m. All nine people aboard were killed, among them Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna.

Robb was lead counsel for Vanessa Bryant, Kobe Bryant’s widow, in her wrongful-death suit against Island Express Helicopters, its holding company and the estate of its pilot, Ara Zobayan. The 27-count complaint accused Zobayan of failing to abort the flight and of failing “to use ordinary care in piloting the subject aircraft,” and alleged that Island Express “authorized, directed and/or permitted a flight with full knowledge that the subject helicopter was flying into unsafe weather conditions.” The FAA had cited Zobayan in 2015 for violating visual-flight-rule minimums, and the complaint alleged that the company did not provide “adequate training and/or supervision” afterward and did not install a terrain alarm system in the helicopter.

In February 2021 the National Transportation Safety Board determined that the crash was caused by Zobayan’s decision to fly under visual flight rules in cloudy conditions, which left him spatially disoriented and cost him control of the aircraft. Flying under visual flight rules through cloud cover was “legally prohibited,” the board’s chairman, Robert Sumwalt, said, yet Zobayan had “continued his flight into clouds.” On June 22, 2021, in a joint notice filed by Robb, the families, Island Express and its insurers told the court that they had agreed to settle. The agreement also resolved the suits brought by the families of the other passengers, and its terms were confidential.

A Harness on the East River

Trevor Cadigan was 26 and had recently moved from Dallas to New York City to begin a journalism career at Business Insider. On March 11, 2018, he and his best friend, Brian McDaniel, a 26-year-old Dallas firefighter, took a doors-off sightseeing flight sold by FlyNYON aboard a helicopter owned by Liberty Helicopters, with passengers held in by harnesses and tethers. Fourteen minutes after takeoff the helicopter went down in the East River near East 88th Street. Its flotation system failed to inflate fully, and it tipped onto its side as cold water flooded the cockpit. All five passengers drowned, Cadigan and McDaniel among them. The pilot, Richard Vance, survived; he had not been strapped in the way the passengers were.

The National Transportation Safety Board found that the passenger harnesses had been adapted from ones designed for construction workers. They were meant to keep passengers from falling out of the open doors; in the water they held them in place. Each was attached to a locked carabiner that had to be found and unscrewed, and in an emergency passengers were to find a knife hidden in a pocket of the harness and cut themselves free; the board found the cutting tool ineffective. In a transcript of video from the cabin, released by the board, a passenger struggling to free himself said: “How do I cut this?”

The board found that a passenger’s tether had caught on the floor-mounted fuel shutoff lever and stopped the engine, and it largely blamed FlyNYON for installing hard-to-escape harnesses and for using an exemption meant for newsgathering, commercial photography and film shoots to avoid the safety requirements for tourist flights. Investigators found that FlyNYON promoted “sneaker selfies,” pictures of passengers’ feet dangling over lower Manhattan, while telling employees to avoid terms such as “air tour” or “sightseeing.” After the crash the FAA temporarily grounded doors-off flights with tight restraints; they resumed under a requirement for restraints that can be released with a single action.

Pilots had repeatedly raised concerns about the safety equipment with FlyNYON’s management, and one warned that “we are setting ourselves up for failure.” In a January 2018 email, less than two months before the flight, FlyNYON’s chief executive, Patrick K. Day, wrote: “Let me be clear, this isn’t a safety issue with the harnesses.”

Robb represented Cadigan’s mother, Nancy Cadigan, and his sister in New York Supreme Court in Manhattan. They alleged that doors-off tours were far more dangerous than ordinary closed-door flights because the harnesses were much harder to release in an emergency than regular helicopter straps, and they sued the flotation-system maker, Dart, over an inflation device that failed to go off when the helicopter hit the water. In submissions to the safety board, FlyNYON had faulted the helicopter’s design and the flotation system, and Dart had suggested that the pilot did not use the system properly. Cadigan’s father, Jerry Cadigan, a broadcast journalist and an original plaintiff, died in July 2024 at 72, before the verdict, while visiting relatives in St. Louis during a break in the trial.

On September 18, 2024, after a trial of more than three months, the jury returned $116,067,076, finding FlyNYON and Liberty nearly equally liable and Dart liable for the defective flotation device: 42 percent of the fault went to FlyNYON, 38 percent to Liberty and 20 percent to Dart. “These doors-off helicopter tour operators put Trevor in a death trap, and they knew it,” Robb said. “They were fully aware for months that the passengers would have no chance of escape from their make-shift harness and tether system in the event of an emergency water landing.” Expecting passengers to work through the release steps in a panicked plunge into icy water was a “death sentence,” he said. “He didn’t see the final journey to justice,” Robb said of Jerry Cadigan, “but he knew it was coming.”

On March 28, 2025, Justice James d’Auguste, who had presided over the trial, approved a $90 million cash settlement as “reasonable in all respects.” “Mr. Cadigan died the most horrific death a human could suffer,” Robb said. The settlement foreclosed any appeal of the verdict and closed a case that had run seven years, and the family believed, he said, that it would “have an immediate impact on helicopter tour practices.”

Part 91 After Butler

On June 14, 2026, a single-engine plane carrying eleven skydivers and a pilot went down shortly after takeoff from Butler Memorial Airport in Butler, Missouri, about 300 yards from the runway, killing all twelve people aboard. Two of the victims’ families retained Robb & Robb, where Andrew Robb, a partner, spoke for them. After the crash, Gary Robb pointed to the 2006 crash at Sullivan, about 200 miles to the east. “They used inexpensive parts, and it caused the failure in that case,” he said. The National Transportation Safety Board had recommended in 2008 that the FAA impose stricter rules on parachute-jump flights, which operate under the general aviation rules of Part 91; the FAA declined, citing lower accident rates for skydiving than for other private flights. “That would have saved lives if we had done this two decades ago,” he said. “And they still haven’t done it.”