Delaware Court Finds Accident Reconstructionists Qualified To Testify In Helicopter Crash Case

The Superior Court of Delaware recently addressed the admissibility of expert opinion proffered by accident reconstructionists in a wrongful death action involving a helicopter crash over the Gulf of Mexico.  Each party challenged the other’s experts asserting that the experts were unqualified and their opinions unreliable.

The court found, in large part, that the plaintiffs’ experts’ methodologies were reliable and the experts were sufficiently qualified to testify.  Of note, the defendants had repeatedly challenged the experts’ methodologies as unreliable because they relied on each other’s assumptions and conducted collaborative investigations.  The court found that under Delaware law, a collaborative approach to accident reconstruction investigations was justifiable and constituted an accepted methodology.  The court explained that an expert could rely on another expert’s calculations as long as a necessary foundation was established.

The court also addressed the qualifications of some of the plaintiffs’ experts on the grounds that they had received no education beyond high school.  These experts were qualified to testify on their respective topics based on their many years of experience, given that the Delaware standard for expert qualification is “liberal” and, accordingly, that “an expert may be sufficiently qualified by skill or experience.”

 

The court also concluded that the defense experts’ testimony was reliable enough not to be excluded.