WASHINGTON – Relatives of three U.S. soldiers involved in a January Black Hawk helicopter crash have filed a lawsuit claiming assembly defects caused a mechanical failure, leading to the crash that killed one and injured the other two soldiers.
The Jan. 16 crash of a UH-60M during a training flight at Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah, Georgia, killed co-pilot Capt. Clayton Carpenter and injured the pilot, Chief Warrant Officer 3 Jon Ternstrom, and crew chief Spc. Cameron Witzler. The Army named a missing cotter pin in the aircraft’s tail rotor as the cause.
The three men were in the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. The lawsuit, filed on Monday in a Los Angeles superior court by relatives of the men, names Sikorsky Aircraft; Sikorsky Aerospace; Prototype Engineering and Manufacturing; Cubic Defense Applications; BAE Systems; and BAE Systems Simula.
Maj. Allen Hill, a spokesman for the 160th, would not comment on the lawsuit. He said an Army safety investigation concluded that a small cotter pin inside the tail rotor was missing. The cotter pin was used to hold a nut in place, which appeared to have come loose, allowing the pilot’s controls to become disconnected from the rotor, which caused a catastrophic failure of the aircraft.
“It looks like somebody building this aircraft for the Army allowed it to go out without that cotter pin,” said Timothy Loranger, a lawyer for the families. “It’s tragic someone appears not to have been paying attention.”
The UH-60M, produced by Sikorsky, is the most recent Black Hawk variant in service with the Army. “Our policy is to not comment on matters in litigation, but we stand behind the Black Hawk and will defend vigorously against these allegations,” Sikorsky spokesman Paul Jackson said in a statement.
Prototype Engineering and Manufacturing, of Gardena, California, certified that the tail rotor assembly had been inspected, according to Loranger. Prototype Engineering and Manufacturing did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
One week after the crash, the Army Aviation and Missile Life Cycle Management Command at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama, ordered visual inspections of the servo coupling assemblies inside the pitch change shaft assemblies of all H-60 series helicopters. The inspections found one other helicopter with a missing cotter pin out of 2,111 aircraft, according to a command spokesman.
The lawsuit claims that the crashed helicopter had returned from an uneventful training flight to Saint Augustine, Florida, and was cleared to land, when its tail rotor pitch change shaft began to rotate uncontrollably before it lost altitude and crashed. Ternstrom and Carpenter had executed emergency procedures to no avail, the lawsuit says.
The complaint also alleges that the helicopter’s emergency locator transmitter failed to activate during the crash, so no alert was transmitted to air traffic control that the crash had happened. That, the complaint says, led to a delayed emergency response.
The lawsuit says Carpenter, 30, died from massive internal injuries and that Ternstrom, 40, and Witzler, 23, still suffer from physical and psychological injuries that have prevented them from returning to duty. It says seats in the helicopter failed to absorb shock from the crash as they were designed to do.
Hill, the unit spokesman, could not immediately comment on alleged failures within the aircraft beyond the missing cotter pin in the tail rotor.
