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The widow of a victim of a deadly plane crash is suing the companies that designed, manufactured and maintained the Cessna 208B EX Caravan that crashed during flight testing in 2022. On Nov. 18, 2022 on the fourth day of testing a drag-reduction system the plane broke apart during the flight, killing the two pilots and two staff members on board. Now, the wife of one of the victims, 33-year-old aerospace engineer Nathan Precup, is suing Cessna's parent company Textron Aviation, maintenance company Ace Aviation, aircraft components maker Mistequay Group and aerodynamics equipment design firm Raisbeck Engineering. She hopes the wrongful death and product defect suit will hold Textron accountable for the flaws that led to the four fatalities.RELATED STORIES:NTSB report sheds new light on Cessna 208 test-flight crash that killed 44 killed in test-flight crash of Cessna 208B in Washington state; wing separated during flight
Wichita KSNW reports that Danielle Martin filed the suit over the crash that killed her partner Precup, along with 49-year-old Nate Lachendro, 52-year-old Scott Brenneman and 67-year-old David Newton, two of whom were pilots and one was the test director.
The final flight was the fourth day of a series of test flights to test the capability of Raisbeck to expand the applicability of the DRS to the Cessna 208B EX model. Multiple test flights were conducted in the days leading up to the crash. The last flight on the third day was cut short when an aft crewmember felt ill. The purpose of the accident flight was to complete the test card from the prior day, which was a baseline testing of the plane's at CG stall characteristics. Witnesses observed the plane breakup in flight and watched as pieces began floating down. The plane descended in a nose-low near-vertical corkscrew maneuver toward the ground. Numerous witnesses reported seeing a white plume of smoke when the plane broke into pieces. A security camera recorded the plane rotating about its longitudinal axis in a nose-low attitude.
According to the complaint filed by the widow, the aircraft as a whole and/or one or more of its components were not reasonably safe in design, "because one or more of the Product Defendants failed to design the relevant product in a manner that would prevent the likelihood that the aircraft would fail to perform safely under circumstances similar to those that killed Nathan Precup and his fellow occupants."
"At the time of manufacture, the likelihood that the product would cause Plaintiff's harm or similar harms, and the seriousness of those harms, outweighed the burden on the manufacturer to design a product that would have prevented those harms and the adverse effect than an alternative design that was practical and feasible would have on the usefulness of the product, and/or the relevant product(s) was/were unsafe to an extent beyond that which would be contemplated by the ordinary consumer," the complaint said.
According to HeraldNet, the families of Lachendro and Brenneman sued Textron last year and the cases are set to go to trial in June, reporting that Textron denied all allegations brought by Brenneman's survivors.
The NTSB has not issued its final report on the crash at the time of this publication and has not indicated a probable cause for the in-flight breakup and crash.