As the search for Flight 800’s victims continued off Long Island last week, St. Charles and many other air-crash survivors gave grieving relatives a bit of hard-won advice: if you intend to sue for damages, the ugly part is yet to come. Those who sue the airlines and their insurance companies in the wake of a major air disaster are choosing to play hardball in courts. The legal wrangling may take years, and it has nothing to do with justice or compassion. It’s about money, lots of it, and in the intensely adversarial world of big-stakes litigation, the other side will probably stop at nothing. Your medical records, your employment history – even your sex life – is fair game if it pertains, even indirectly, to your claim. The airline employee who offers a shoulder to cry on may be collecting information that can be used against you in court. ““These families all need counseling, someone to talk to,’’ says lawyer Stanley Chesley of Cincinnati. ““Here’s where the grieving widow blurts out, “John was sick with cancer and had just six months to live.’ Bingo! That’s what the insurer wants to know.''
That is not to say TWA, which faces huge settlement costs in the Flight 800 disaster, has acted less than properly. After some early fumbles that earned public criticism from New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the airline has generally earned high marks for its sensitive and decent handling of victims’ families. And airline lawyers like Mark Dombroff, who represented USAir in the Flight 405 disaster, says ““every one of my clients wants to give full, fair and complete compensation’’ to victims or their families. But relatives who expect to sue will enter a maze of legal technicalities. Because the doomed jet was an international flight, damage awards under the 1929 Warsaw Convention will be limited to $75,000 per victim unless the airline can be shown to be guilty of ““willful misconduct’’ – a much tougher legal standard than the one that applies to domestic flights. And because the plane crashed at sea, U.S. maritime law applies – and it says that only wives and dependent children can claim damages at all. ““That’s a double whammy,’’ says San Francisco lawyer Gerald Sterns. ““Not only do you have the $75,000 cap, you also have the law of the high seas. Where does that leave the high-school students from Montoursville, Pa.? Legally, their lives have no value.''
Sterns and other plaintiffs’ lawyers will be watching closely to see how TWA’s lead insurance company, U.S. Aviation Underwriters, which manages a pool of 15 insurers, handles the settlements. That’s because U.S. Aviation Underwriters, which was also the primary insurer in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, has a history of controversial and, according to critics, unethical practice. Just three weeks before TWA 800, in fact, the insurance company and its former CEO were convicted of 40 counts of mail fraud in connection with its handling of a 1987 Southwest Airlines disaster near Los Angeles. In that case, prosecutors said, the company sought ““to lie and to hide important information’’ and that its motives were ““ego and greed.’’ U.S. Aviation Underwriters says the Feds ““criminalized routine, good-faith business decisions.''
But its current CEO, Harold Clark, did not deny the insurance company played a curious game in the aftermath of the Pan Am 103 crash. In that case, lawyers for Pan Am and the insurance company faced claims of ““willful misconduct’’ because Pan Am’s loose security may have allowed a terrorist bomb on the plane. To rebut the charge, lawyers for the airline and U.S. Aviation Underwriters hired a self-styled Israeli spy named Juval Aviv, who produced a wildly speculative theory that a rogue faction of the CIA had advance knowledge of the bomb plot and had failed to stop it. If true, this claim could have reduced the airline’s liability to zero. Although no credible evidence was discovered to support this theory, defense lawyers continued to leak the story in what appears to have been an attempt to confuse jurors in the damage suits. Pan Am and U.S. Aviation Underwriters lost the case as lawyers for the victims’ families accused them of spreading ““disinformation’’ and ““false stories’’ about the crash. Clark, questioned by NEWSWEEK, insisted that his company had committed ““no wrongdoing’’ in pursuing or circulating the conspiracy theory about the crash.
Under prodding from the airlines, the U.S. Department of Transportation is now considering increasing the outdated $75,000 limit on damage claims arising from international flights. That’s good news for survivors of future air disasters, though it may not affect awards in the lawsuits that are sure to be filed by the relatives of TWA 800 victims. And it will not really make the legal aftermath of future tragedies easier to bear. Jack Schultz, whose son Thomas died on Pan Am 103, says he and his wife were ““treated like st’’ by the airline, grilled by the FBI and confronted with relentless cross-examination by lawyers for Pan Am and U.S. Aviation Underwriters. The Schultzes were asked if Thomas smoked or drank, what his grades were and whether he earned money on his own – anything, Schultz says, to show ““he was dependent on us.’’ The lawyers, Schultz thinks, were needlessly cruel – and he says ““they made us cry again and again.''
THEY’RE LOOKING FOR needles in a haystack that’s twice the size of Rhode Island – and 120 feet underwater. The news last week from Smithtown, N.Y., where the investigation into the crash of TWA Flight 800 has its on-site headquarters, was frustratingly bereft of any hard evidence of a bomb. The seas were rough, divers got the bends, a 45-foot section of the plane’s fuselage broke in half and sank as it was being lifted to the surface. Press reports that the 747’s forward landing gear showed bomb damage turned out to be premature. ““Somewhere in the front part of the airplane are the clues,’’ FBI Assistant Director James Kallstrom told NEWSWEEK. Better weather at the weekend helped the navy to recover a 40-by-60-foot piece of the plane’s upper deck – though the cockpit and its clues still lay beneath the sea.
Meanwhile, agents of an FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force, pushing ahead on the still-unconfirmed assumption that a bomb was involved, compiled a master list of terrorist groups that might have done it. Among the candidates: supporters of Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, convicted of a plot to blow up U.N. headquarters in New York; a wealthy Saudi named Osman bin Laden, who has ties to Islamic militants, and the friends of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, now on trial in New York for conspiring to bomb three or more U.S. airliners in a single day. But it could be years before investigators find proof – if they ever do.
