Defendants Win Summary Judgment In Australian Plane Crash Case In Illinois Federal Court

The estate administrators of victims of an Australia plane crash sued three companies in the United States alleging that the pilots’ navigational charts and the plane’s ground proximity warning system (“GPWS”) caused the crash.  In granting the defendants’ motion for summary judgment, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois held that the plaintiffs failed to establish a prima facie case that the navigational chart contributed to the crash or that the GPWS was defective and also contributed to the crash.  Additionally, the court concluded that the defendants did not have a duty to warn the plane’s operating company of the existence of a product superior to the installed GPWS when the operating company was already aware of such fact. Notably, the plaintiffs failed to file their own Rule 56.1 statement of facts in response to the motion for summary judgment and failed to respond to the defendants’ statement.  The court explained that this was “all but fatal to Plaintiffs’ claims” as the record did not contain evidence to support their claims.  The plaintiffs did attach several affidavits to their response to the motion for summary judgment, but the affidavits were not properly before the court and therefore not considered in determining whether there was a genuine issue of material fact.