The co-pilot of the Challenger business jet that crashed in Montrose 19 months ago has sued the plane’s maker and seven air charter companies, claiming the aircraft was “defectively designed” and unsafe to operate in icing conditions.
The plane crashed seconds after takeoff Nov. 28, 2004, killing the captain, flight attendant and 14-year-old Teddy Ebersol, son of NBC executive Dick Ebersol.
Dick Ebersol and the plane’s other two occupants – another son, Charlie, and Eric Wicksell, the co-pilot – suffered serious injuries. Ebersol, who has a home in Telluride, had chartered the jet for family travel.
In the lawsuit filed in a Broward County, Fla. court, Wicksell’s lawyers said Bombardier Corp., the plane’s manufacturer, “knew that the dangerous conditions inherent in icing would not be detected by reasonable inspection by any user.”
In early May, the National Transportation Safety Board said the probable cause of the Challenger accident was “the flight crew’s failure to ensure that the airplane’s wings were free of ice or snow contamination that accumulated while the airplane was on the ground.”
That failure by the pilots “resulted in an attempted takeoff with upper-wing contamination that induced the subsequent stall and collision with the ground,” the NTSB said.
Robert Parks, Wicksell’s lawyer, said if current procedures that require pilots to feel for ice on the wings (instead of mere visual inspections), had been in place before the accident, the crash might have been avoided.
The safety agency said another factor contributing to the accident was the lack of experience that Wicksell, now 32, and Luis Polanco, the plane’s 50-year-old captain, had flying in winter weather conditions.
NTSB’s report said Wicksell “failed to challenge the captain’s noncompliance with company procedures … and, therefore, failed to provide a second pilot’s critical independent evaluation and monitoring function.”
Bombardier spokesman Leo Knaapen said he could not comment on the lawsuit. But he added, “It’s quite clear in the report where the onus of error lay.”
Staff writer Jeffrey Leib can be reached at 303-820-1645 or jleib@denverpost.com.
