In my earlier post, mentioned the need for tort reform as related to killing US jobs. That same day, I received the March issue of "AOPA Flyer", the magazine for the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association. It had an article about a company who made vacuum pumps for general aviation aircraft. Many lower end aircraft use vacuum pumps to drive the primary gyroscopic instruments, the attitude indicator and the directional gyro. It's a fairly small market with only a few manufacturers for sales of perhaps 10,000 pumps a year.

Well, there's now one less manufacturer. The company, Parker Hannifin, had made the vacuum pumps that were in the Cessna 335 (a light twin-engine airplace) that killed Missouri Governor Mel Carnahan. The crash happened because the governor's son, who was flying the plane, lost control in very bad weather due to an attitude indicator failure. The NTSB found no evidence of vacuum pump failure (and the plane had dual pumps, anyway), but Parker Hannifin still ended up losing $4 million. You see, being innocent doesn't mean a thing when it comes to lawsuits. All it takes is a slick enough lawyer to con a majority of uninformed juriors (knowledgable jurors are almost always excluded) and you can lose millions.

So, Parker Hannifin is no longer in the vacuum pump business. Odds are, the employees who made those pumps lost their jobs - all due to an out of control tort system.

The article, "Lose/lose", is in the member's only section of the AOPA website, so I won't post the link. Here's the lead-in:

When is a $4 million verdict against you a victory? When it could have been a $100 million verdict.

Does anyone besides me see a problem with a $4 million verdict against a company that, according to the most authoritative accident investigation agency in the world, had no role in causing the accident? The victim here is a company called Parker Hannifin. Chances are that somewhere on the airplane you fly there's a component made by Parker Hannifin. Until early last year it was a major supplier of vacuum pumps — one of the few remaining. But at least partly as a result of the accident that led to this verdict it understandably bailed from this market.

Now, general aviation is down a major supplier, Parker Hannifin's insurance company is going to be out something like $2.8 million, and the three people aboard the airplane that crashed are still dead. No one won this case. It was a lose/lose verdict.