Oct. 18--Monument-based Excel-Jet Ltd. sued the federal government Tuesday, alleging air traffic controllers caused Excel-Jet's prototype aircraft to crash last year by allowing it to take off too soon after a larger aircraft at the Colorado Springs Airport.
The suit was filed in federal court in Denver and seeks unspecified damages for loss of the aircraft, the company's reduced value and loss of future sales and profits "stemming from the crash," according to a news release issued Wednesday by Excel-Jet.
Allen Kenitzer, a Federal Aviation Administration spokesman in Renton, Wash., said the agency "cannot comment on matters of litigation." The suit names the federal government but not the agency, which employs the controllers at the Springs airport and sets rules under which they work.
The suit comes as Excel-Jet is asking Louisiana officials to ante up $1 million to build an aircraft hangar to house its aircraft manufacturing operation that would employ up to 300. A previously planned move to Guthrie, Okla., was postponed after the crash.
Pilot James Stewart and passenger John Welty were injured when the company's Sport-Jet crashed June 22, 2006, during takeoff on a test flight. The aircraft was airborne for only a moment before it rolled violently to the left and began to cartwheel down the runway.
The suit alleges that controllers at the airport failed to follow federal air traffic rules that require small aircraft such as the Sport-Jet not be allowed to take off until three minutes after a larger aircraft completes a takeoff on the same runway.
As a result of allowing the Sport-Jet to take off too soon after a Dash-8 turboprop plane, the suit said the Sport-Jet "encountered wake turbulence from the Dash-8 and, at an altitude of approximately 15 feet, experienced an uncommanded, violent roll to the left."
Wake turbulence is a pair of horizontal cyclones created by a moving plane when air passes over its wings. It can reduce or eliminate the lift that allows an aircraft to get and stay airborne if that aircraft follows another plane too closely.
A report issued by the National Transportation Safety Board in April on the crash concluded that "it is most likely that the wake vortices (from the Dash-8) were neither strong enough nor close enough to the Sport-Jet to cause the violent roll to the left."
The NTSB report determined the Sport-Jet took off 2 minutes and 11 seconds after the Dash-8. That would be 49 seconds sooner than FAA rules allow.
Excel-Jet said in the release that it filed the suit after 15 months of "extensive investigation" because "it has no option but take this action to prove that there was no fault with the aircraft or pilot" as concluded by experts the company's attorneys had hired.
"Test pilots James Stewart and Ron McElroy had accumulated 24 hours of virtually flawless flight testing," Excel-Jet President Bob Bornhofen said in the release. "The Sport-Jet had explored the majority of its flight envelope without problems," referring to a term describing the aircraft's capability to handle flight conditions.
Excel-Jet's attorneys for the suit include Denver-based Coppola & Marlin PC and Broomfield-based Schaden Katzman Lampert & Mc-Clune, which helped identify rudder problems with Boeing 737 aircraft that are believed to have caused a 1991 crash that killed 25 in Widefield.
The law firm was also involved in a case stemming from the 2001 crash of an American Airlines Airbus aircraft in New York that killed 265 and was blamed in part on wake turbulence from a larger Boeing 747 aircraft that had taken off moments earlier.
The Sport-Jet is a single-engine, four-passenger jet that Excel-Jet plans to sell to private pilots for about $1.2 million if it is approved by the FAA.
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