Jeff Smith nearly died five years ago in Worthington, Massachusetts.
One winter night, after helping fix his mother's computer, he set off on his snowmobile in the dark, along farm fields and forests, to meet up with his brother.
After going over a ridge, he said his headlights reflected off "something." That something, he found out after the crash, was a Black Hawk helicopter sitting in an old potato field that's also a rarely used local airstrip.
Smith's lawyer, Doug Desjardins, explains what he had to prove to U.S. District Court Judge Mark Mastroianni in order to win the case.
Doug Desjardins, lawyer: This is what's called a Federal Tort Claims Act case. And so, you do not get a jury. You have to try it to a judge. And you have to basically prove that the government wasn't just negligent [because] that would be a normal kind of civil case. But it's not within the — what's kind of wonky, called the discretionary function exemption of the Federal Tort Claims Act, which is an exemption that gives the government wide latitude to do governmentally kind of things.
And so, the judge didn't allow us to put on any evidence concerning the decision to land at Worthington, and we had to show that remaining in Worthington for that social gathering was the negligent act. And that's essentially what he found.
Carrie Healy, NEPM: And this was negligence on the part of the federal government?
Yeah, on the part of the Army crew that landed in Worthington. And really, the issue was, they weren't so much doing night-vision training as they were attending a social gathering. That's what we sought to prove. And ... Judge Mastroianni, in his opinion, laid that out.
You work primarily in the area of transportation law?
Yeah, most of most of what we do is aircraft kind of stuff. But also, you know, kind of strange — this is a case that's well up our alley, and it's a case of really bizarre facts. I mean, I don't think anybody has seen a helicopter vs. snowmobile crash, and a lot of the stuff that we do is strange like this one.
I imagine adding to that strangeness, though, is that the Black Hawk wasn't actively being used. And it was set down in that field that had previously, for decades, been used by snowmobilers.
Right. It didn’t get into the opinion, but I did a deep dive into it. I think that it had been an active snowmobile trail since the '60s. The landowner who had the farm previously, would farm potatoes on the land and use the strip for a crop-dusting strip. And then in the winter, they turned it over to a snowmobile strip.
We asked FlightAware if they could tell us if anybody had landed there, and they had no record of anybody landing there. I think the testimony in the case said the last landing was in the late 1990s, as I recall.
Full disclosure, my husband used to snowmobile on that field when he was much younger. So, you know, it's crazy. The whole thing is crazy.
It is really crazy. One of the things that I contended was that the current landowner should let the FAA know that that's not an active strip because it's an accident waiting to happen.
And the way the FAA regulates airstrips is the owners of the strip have to let the FAA know that they want to take them out of service. I think it's still on the aeronautical charts today, which I think is wrong. I mean, I think somebody should reach out to him and say, "Hey, this is a decommissioned airfield." But apparently folks don't want to do that.
Although, the Army had some idea that it was not truly operational. If you go to the flight directory and call the number that's listed there — that's supposed to get to the owner — it's a disconnected [phone] number. They had to do a little bit of work to get a hold of the owner.
So, you ended up with an award of $3.3 million in damages. Previously, you've said that you believe that justice was served and the decision encourages public safety. It's been more than five years since that crash. Are you getting any indication that the Army or the U.S. government has or will change how they are using these Black Hawks in situations like this?
I think the decision probably sends a pretty serious message to the Army. And so, I'm just assuming that they will heed the message that is sent by the decision and, and hopefully change their behavior.
We should note that in the decision, Judge Mastroianni also criticized Smith for not operating the snowmobile safely, for speeding and for wearing tinted goggles.
This report includes information from The Associated Press.
