USAir Flight 427: $7 Million Settlement for a Victim's Family in Boeing Rudder-Defect Litigation
Jamie Lebovitz threatened to take Boeing to trial in the Flight 427 wrongful-death MDL and, on the scheduled trial date, accepted a settlement of approximately $7 million for his client's family, a figure reported as far above what most other victims' families received.
What happened
On September 8, 1994, USAir Flight 427 plunged into a ravine near Hopewell Township, Pennsylvania, while on final approach to Pittsburgh International Airport, killing all 132 passengers and crew. The Boeing 737-300 had been descending normally when the aircraft suddenly rolled and pitched nose-down at roughly 300 miles per hour. There were no survivors.
Federal investigators traced the disaster to the aircraft's rudder system. The National Transportation Safety Board concluded that a jam in the main rudder power control unit servo valve caused the rudder to deflect hard in a direction opposite to what the pilots commanded, sending the plane into an unrecoverable dive. Lawyers representing victims' families advanced a related design-defect theory: that Boeing had long been aware its 737 rudders could reverse under certain conditions but had not warned airlines or corrected the problem. Boeing disputed that explanation throughout the early years of litigation, pointing instead to pilot error.
The wrongful-death claims from all 132 deaths were consolidated into a multidistrict proceeding in the Western District of Pennsylvania. Jamie Lebovitz of Nurenberg, Paris, Heller and McCarthy represented one victim's family in that proceeding. His approach, developed over years of aviation-disaster work, centered on building a detailed documentary portrait of the decedent's life and economic contributions, so that Boeing and its insurers would understand what a Cleveland jury might award.
Lebovitz spent roughly three years pushing through depositions and resisting early settlement offers. When a trial date was set, he maintained the threat of actually trying the case. On the day trial was to begin, he accepted an offer of approximately $7 million for his client. That figure was substantially higher than the amounts most other Flight 427 families had settled for individually, reflecting the economic and damages profile Lebovitz had built for the decedent.
Boeing later agreed to redesign the rudder control system and paid to retrofit the entire worldwide 737 fleet. The Flight 427 claims were consolidated in the Western District of Pennsylvania, where 47 cases were filed and another 19 were transferred in by the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation. Across that litigation, most families settled for between roughly $1.25 million and $2 million, a handful of higher-value cases resolved for between $5 million and $10 million, and one record settlement reached $25.2 million. The Nurenberg Paris result sat well above the band most families received.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Nurenberg Paris Heller & McCarthy
All Nurenberg Paris Heller & McCarthy proven verdicts →Jamie Lebovitz served on the federal MDL Plaintiff's Steering Committee for the Alaska Airlines Flight 261 disaster, representing 18 families in confidential individual settlements as part of a broader litigation that recovered more than $300 million for surviving relatives of the 88 people killed.
David Paris and Kathleen St. John won Ohio Supreme Court certification of a 1.4-million-member class and secured a $31 million court-approved settlement after proving State Farm concealed a 1994 high-court ruling that would have entitled policyholders to enhanced uninsured-motorist coverage.
A Cuyahoga County jury found MetroHealth Medical Center and its obstetrician departed from the standard of care in a high-risk pregnancy, leaving a child born at 25 weeks with cerebral palsy, developmental delays and visual impairment. The jury awarded $14.5 million. Ohio's cap on non-economic damages against political subdivisions and a collateral-source offset cut it to $3.451 million at the trial court, and in 2017 the Eighth District reinstated the future economic award, for a total of $8.5 million.
An 85-year-old Marietta woman died in a May 2019 house fire after a storm brought a tree limb down on her service line and the utility took about 12 hours to respond. A Washington County jury found Ohio Power 90 percent negligent in April 2022 and awarded $6 million in compensatory damages. The award was reduced by the 10 percent fault assigned to the decedent, leaving $5.4 million.
Related wrongful death verdicts
In December 2011, a Fayette County, Texas jury awarded the family of an 8-year-old Splendora boy $150.37 billion after he was doused with gasoline and set on fire by a 13-year-old neighbor in 1998, two weeks after the same neighbor sexually assaulted him. The boy survived third-degree burns over 99 percent of his body for nearly 13 years before dying in April 2011 of a skin cancer linked to his injuries. The defendant, Don Wilburn Collins, never appeared to answer the civil suit, and the jury awarded $370 million in actual damages plus roughly $150 billion in punitive damages, the largest civil verdict in U.S. history. Attorney Craig Sico, who represented the family, said from the outset that the judgment was not collectible and was intended to pressure prosecutors into reopening the long-dormant criminal case. Prosecutors did reopen the case, and Collins was later convicted of capital murder in a separate criminal proceeding.
A Pensacola jury awarded Cynthia Robinson $23.6 billion in punitive damages against R.J. Reynolds over the 1996 lung cancer death of her 36-year-old husband, the largest single-plaintiff award of Florida's Engle tobacco litigation, but the trial judge called the number constitutionally excessive, an appeals court ordered a full retrial over improper closing arguments, and a second jury returned a complete defense verdict in 2019, so the estate ultimately collected nothing.
Frantz Law Group, representing roughly 5,000 victims, helped negotiate a $13.5 billion PG&E bankruptcy settlement covering tens of thousands of survivors and families from the 2015 Butte, 2017 North Bay, and 2018 Camp wildfires.