Cessna Aircraft Company began its defense this week in a civil trial over the 2005 crash of one of its airplanes at Katama, calling witnesses who defended the plane’s seat-locking system, raised questions about the pilot’s actions, and disputed future medical costs and lost income the pilot and passengers could incur.
Testifying in a crowded makeshift courtroom Thursday, the pilot in a 2005 plane crash at Katama airfield gave his account of the accident that left him confined to a wheelchair without the use of his legs.
“I remember at first my morale was very high,” Alec Naiman — who is deaf and was communicating through a sign-language interpreter — said of his subsequent hospitalization. “I was teasing everybody and flirting with all the nurses.”
A civil trial stemming from a 2005 plane crash at Katama Airfield began this week, with jurors hearing emotional testimony from one of the survivors, venturing to the airfield to examine the plane’s wreckage and pondering technical evidence about key parts of the plane at the center of the case.
A civil trial started today stemming from a 2005 plane crash at Katama Airfield, with jurors hearing from one of the crash survivors and taking a trip to the airfield to look at the plane’s wreckage.
The plane’s pilot, Alec Naiman, and his passengers, Jeffrey and Jessica Willoughby, are suing Cessna Aircraft Company in Dukes County Superior Court, claiming that the accident was the result of faulty rails on the pilot’s seat. Cessna is arguing that the crash was due to pilot error.
A training flight that departed from the Vineyard ended in tragedy Sunday when the single-engine plane crashed into the icy waters of Cape Cod Bay, killing flight instructor Oulton Hues of Norwood and Edgartown and his student, Robert Walker of East Falmouth.
Brewster police chief Richard J. Koch Jr. said in a statement Monday that Oulton Hues, 73, of Norwood and Edgartown, and Robert Walker, 68, of Falmouth, were the victims who died in the single-engine plane crash in Cape Cod Bay on Sunday.
Mr. Hues was the pilot and a flight instructor; Mr. Walker was his student and co-owner of the plane, a Piper fixed-wing aircraft.
