Adam Air Victims' Families to Sue Boeing

Families of people who were on board the Adam Air Boeing passenger plane that crashed into the sea off South Sulawesi last January 1 leaving no survivors plan to sue the plane's maker based in Chicago, Illinois, the United States, their lawyer said.

"Based on our experience, we assume that the accident that befell the Boeing 737-400 aircraft of Adam Air was not due to human error or bad weather," Haroen Calehr of law firm Calehr & Associates said here on Tuesday.

Calehr made the announcement at a press conference in the company of a member of the family of one of the victims, Christian, and secretary general of the Association of Families of Adam Air Accident Victims, Antonyus Idris.

He said the association assumed that the accident occurred because of a mechanical malfunction in the plane. "Based on our experience in dealing with aircraft accidents, we assume that the engine of the Adam Air jetliner was not good," he said.

Therefore, he said, the families of the victims would not sue Adam Air as it was not the airline company that was reponsible for the accident but Boeing that had made the plane. "We will soon send a letter about it to Boeing," he said.

If the letter gets no satisfactory response, the association will sue Boeing as the producer of Boeing aircraft and its components, he said.

"Through the lawsuit to be filed in the US we want to find out the truth about the cause of the Adam Air accident, and our findings are expected to have a good impact on flight safety in Indonesia in the future," he said.

He said the truth about the cause of the Adam Air accident could be established as the law in the US enabled the plaintiff to interrogate the accused by producing documents related to the trial process.

"We will use US laws on dereliction and worthinesss. The law on worthiness deals with the producer's accountability of a product and its warranty," he said.

Meanwhile, Christian also said the lawsuit to be filed by about 50 percent of the 96 families of the Adam Air accident victims was not aimed at Adam Air but Boeing.

The Adam Air plane carrying 96 passengers and six crew members went missing during a flight from Surabaya in East Java to Manado in North Sulawesi on January 1, 2007.

Massive search and rescue efforts failed to result in the finding of any survivor or body. Only fragments of the ill-fated aircraft were picked up from the sea.

A search on the sea bed with the help of a US oceanographic survey ship led to the location of the plane's black box but the device has so far not been recovered due to the absence of the needed equipment.

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