NBC Sports Chairman Dick Ebersol and his family are suing the town-based charter aircraft company they hired to arrange a November 2004 flight that crashed in icy conditions and killed Ebersol's 14-year old son, Edward "Teddy" Ebersol.
Ebersol and his wife, the actress Susan Saint James, and their other son, Charles, filed a complaint in New Haven Superior Court that accuses Key Air Inc. of negligence for brokering with a company that used pilots lacking the credentials required on all flights chartered by General Electric, NBC's parent company.
"The family has sued Key Air as the broker of the flight because they did not comply with the qualification requirement that applies to all flights that the Ebersol family is on.
"They know what the requirements are. And they selected a charter that was grossly in violation of them," said Joel Faxon, a New Haven-based attorney representing the Ebersols along with Robert Clifford, an Illinois attorney who specializes in airplane crashes. Brad Kost, Key Air's chief executive officer, said in an interview Wednesday that the company has the "deepest sympathy for the loss to the Ebersol family and for the crew. "We did not operate the aircraft. Our aircraft were in Oxford. It wasn't flown by us, wasn't operated by us, and it was not our crew on board," he said. Kost also disputed the Ebersols' claim that the pilots of the charter company, Air Castle, were not qualified to fly the plane.
Federal investigators found that Air Castle's main pilot was licensed by the Federal Aviation Administration for 25 years. GE, however, requires its chartered flights to have pilots rated at a higher standard.
Kost said that GE's requirement did not apply to the Ebersol flight because it was for a private family trip.
"Key Air's only contact with this tragedy was to fulfill a request by the Ebersol family to arrange a flight through another operator," Kost said. The Ebersols were flying from Van Nuys, Calif., to Oxford on Nov. 28, 2004, and had scheduled stops in Montrose, Colo., to drop off Saint James, and South Bend, Ind., to drop off Charles, a student at the University of Notre Dame. After St. James deplaned in Montrose, the aircraft sat on the runway for about 45 minutes in snowy and icing conditions, according to the lawsuit. It crashed shortly after takeoff, killing Teddy Ebersol, the pilot, and a flight attendant, and fracturing the spines of Dick and Charles Ebersol. Ice on the wings of the Bombardier Inc. Challenger CL-600 was found by federal investigators to have caused the crash.
Copyright 2005 LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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