June 13, 2000
Jury Holds Two Technology Companies Responsible in Plane Crash
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
IAMI -- A federal jury Tuesday found that a software company and the manufacturer of a flight computer were partly responsible for the 1995 crash of an American Airlines jetliner in Colombia that killed 159 people.
Further court hearings will decide how much the two companies have to pay.
The flight from Miami was carrying mostly Colombians heading home for Christmas on Dec. 20. The pilots entered an incorrect code into the flight computer, sending the Boeing 757 into a mountainside near Cali. The pilots were killed; four people survived.
The lawsuit was brought by American, which had alleged that products made by computer maker Honeywell Air Transport Systems of Phoenix and software manufacturer Jeppesen Sanderson of Englewood, Colo., helped cause the crash.
The jury said Jeppesen was 17 percent responsible and Honeywell was 8 percent at fault. It said the two companies produced a defective product. It held American to be 75 percent responsible.
The nine-week trial was an attempt by American to force the two companies to pay a portion of the $300 million already paid out by the airline and its insurers to crash victims and families.
American blamed the software, saying Jeppesen stored the location of the Cali airport beacon in a different file from most other beacons.
Lawyers for the computer companies argued that the beacon code could have been properly accessed and that the pilots were in error.
Colombian crash investigators blamed the crew for the crash, and a U.S. judge ruled similarly in 1997. But an appeals court rejected that, resulting in this trial.
