Judge awards $5.8M to wife of Papillion flght instructor killed in plane crash near Leshara (2024)

A federal judge has awarded $5.8 million in damages to the wife of a Papillion flight instructor killed in a plane crash near Leshara, Nebraska, eight years ago.

“This was an accident waiting to happen for years,” Senior U.S. District Judge John Gerrard wrote in an order this week. “Ron Panting and Michael Trubilla were, unfortunately, the pilots unlucky enough to be aboard when that accident stopped waiting.”

Panting’s widow, Lynne Panting, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the U.S. government in 2019, alleging that the Beechcraft Baron, owned by the LeMay Aero Club, a flying club sponsored by the U.S. Air Force, had a faulty stall-warning switch that failed to warn the pilot, Capt. Michael Trubilla, of an impending stall.

Both men — Panting, who was 61, and Trubilla, who was 27 — died in the crash July 24, 2016.

Panting’s attorneys alleged mechanics for the flight club at Offutt Air Force Base had performed faulty maintenance on the plane, which led to the failure.

At trial, attorneys with the U.S. Department of Justice’s civil division asserted that the crash was the result of the pilots’ improper reaction to a stall and resulting spin.

Panting was a flight instructor at LeMay, as well as a Federal Aviation Administration-designated pilot examiner, administering a practical exam to Trubilla at the time of the crash.

That day, the two had taken off from the Millard Airport because Offutt Air Force Base was closed for an airshow. Trubilla, who had flown Air Force RC-135 jets around the world, was doing a check ride for an air transport certificate, the highest level of civilian pilot certificate.

The test includes a demonstration of certain flight maneuvers, including an impending aerodynamic stall and recovery from it.

At trial, Greg Feith, an expert for the plaintiff, said the test was meant to induce “adverse yaw,” or the kind of vertical twisting of the plane that happens when one engine fails.

But, he said, he believes the plane’s stall warning sensor didn’t sound in the cockpit, causing them to inadvertently get into an actual stall.

Feith said the plane rolled off abruptly to the left and the nose fell through into a spin that at least partially inverted it, if the plane wasn’t fully upside down when it crashed into a soybean field west of Omaha.

Feith, a former air safety investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board who has appeared as a guest aviation safety and security expert for NBC and MSNBC and as a technical advisor on the TV show Air Crash Investigation, said the pilots only would have had about a second to prevent the crash, which physically wasn’t enough time.

Two FAA inspectors who performed an electrical continuity check on the stall warning switch after the crash said it wasn’t operative. Later testing showed corrosion on the switch mechanism.

The government said the switch had functioned at the end of a check ride with another Air Force pilot two days before the crash and a preflight inspection the next day, implying that the aircraft only could have crashed if the pilot had been negligent.

They also contended that Panting had at least some knowledge that the switch had recently malfunctioned, but flew in the plane anyway, assuming the risk.

Gerrard ultimately found that the Aero Club had breached its duty to keep the aircraft in a safe, airworthy condition, and that Panting bore a small portion (15%) of the responsibility for the fatal crash.

The judge said the Beechcraft Baron had a well-established propensity for unrecoverable spins if the aircraft stalled, making it mandatory for its stall warning system to “be kept operational and in proper adjustment at all times.”

“It was, in other words, highly foreseeable that a fatal crash could result from an inoperative stall warning system (particularly for an aircraft used, as the Aero Club’s was, for check rides that might test stall avoidance and recovery),” Gerrard wrote in a 19-page order Monday.

He said this particular stall-warning switch had a “well-documented history of problems.”

It had been a replacement obtained from a salvage yard in Texas and installed in 1999. The government’s own expert testified that the installer should have traced the part to its manufacturer and inspected it for airworthiness. But that didn’t happen here, Gerrard said.

The chief flight instructor for the Aero Club testified that the switch had performed unsatisfactorily on a number of occasions. But the club’s attempts to repair it didn’t last and pilots continued to report failures, Gerrard said.

He said there was no way to know exactly what happened before the aircraft stalled, but: “Both pilots on the aircraft were proven and reliable. The stall warning switch was neither.”

He awarded $1,231,037 in lost financial support Panting would have provided his family, plus $3 million for his wife’s loss and $1 million each to their two children.

He reduced that total, $6,831,037, by 15% for contributory negligence, resulting in a final award totaling $5,806,381.