The air crash that occurred last February 12, 2009, in Clarence, NY, killed 50 people: 45 of them passengers, 4 crew members and 1 person on the ground.
Often people are killed as a result of the negligence of another, without any contribution to the final outcome by the decedent. This is true of passengers in todays airliners, since a plane does not fall from the sky unless someone did not do their job.
In the case of Flight 3407 there is no shortage of potential defendants who may not have properly done their job, which contributed to the cause of the crash. Both the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Air Administration have initiated studies into what went wrong with that flight.
"In aviation crashes, we rarely see a single event that leads to tragedy", said lawyer Ronald L. M. Goldman, a plaintiffs attorney.
A large number of plaintiffs' families have sued a multitude of defendants for wrongful death due to the crash, in both U.S. Federal District Court and New York State Court, because any or several of these defendants may have contributed to the cause of the crash by failing to properly do their job.
If all 50 deceased persons had distributees at the time of the crash, any of the defendants found culpable may be required to pay the reasonable funeral expenses of each decedent, as well as "pecuniary damages", which may include loss of future earnings [depending on past earnings performance and remainder of work life lost], and an amount to compensate for the pain and suffering experienced by each decedent as he/she realized the abrupt end of his/her life.
This type of civil lawsuit is a complex one. There are many plaintiffs, suing many defendants in separate jurisdictions. The potential money damages are staggering in a case such as this. Therefore, each defendant is working hard to point its finger at another party defendant as having greater responsibility for the disaster, and thus, a greater share of the damages to be paid.
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