bntwngbrd

I am the pilot who is involved in the lawsuit of being accused of crashing a Mig jet.

My background for those that do not know me. Been modeling for 30 years and been flying anything from gliders to lots of different types of aircraft of all shapes and sizes. Flight instructor for different clubs and contest cordinator for different clubs. My primary interest in RC is Giant Scale aircraft. Building, flying, training and racing. Flown from 0 mph airspeed to 240mph and 0 to 150 lb birds. I test fly alot of other pilots aircraft. Never asking them, they come to me.
Now, I am no gods gift to RC, but I DO KNOW HOW TO FLY and trouble shoot aircraft and I am good at it.

At this T34 race at Madera in October 2004.
This person comes up to me and asked me if I wanted some stick time on his Mig. I was eating my lunch, and me, I love to fly airplanes, said sure. THIS WAS NOT A TEST FLIGHT. Supposedly, this plane is 6 years old and has been proven.
I do not know this person other than seeing him at other meets (T34 races only).
So we go out to fly his airplane. He starts the jet and taxis out. I am standing next to him and he does a couple of laps around the field. He hands me the TX at full throttle. Well the plane is not that fast. Good cruising speed for it and it looks good. The first thing I do is wave the ailerons and check how the plane responds/handles. The owner did not say anything whether or not the plane had any bad habits. He said nothing the entire flight.
I was flying the plane for about 3 minutes and did some very minor aerobatics. These consisted of a 4 point roll, half a cuban eight, a fly by and a slow roll. After the slow roll I rolled out to a slow right turn, nothing tight just a casual turn, then banked to the left for a 270 turn to put me back over the runway. Well the whole time that I was flying the owner was standing right next to me. STILL SAYING NOTHING !!!!
Well into my left turn at about 150 ft of altitude I started to feed opposite control on the ailerons to straighten her out. At the point I fed in right aileron, the plane did not respond to aileron. It kept on rolling to the left and at that time I fed in full right aileron and full right rudder and when the plane did not respond my instinct was to pull back the throttle. The owner was standing next to me, I showed him the input on the transmitter. Full right aileron, full right rudder and throttle all the way back to idle. The plane went in full throttle,left roll. Well, lots of pieces. The owners comment was lets finish the day of racing and then we can work things out.

I put alot of emphasis on flying anything as smooth as I can. You can ask anybody that knows me. After a plane goes down like this I feel as if it is a death in the family. I felt awful. I still feel bad for the loss of this aircraft.
To make a long story short. This guy has papers served to me to sue for $5000

We go to small claims court. He gets up and pretty much everything this person said was a LIE. One part, he was standing there in front of me demanding me to give him his transmitter back and that I refused. GET REAL.
He gets a person and says that this is my witness. Some person that just started in the RC world. This guy says that while I was flying the jet that it looked like it was totally out of control the whole time. COME ON, YOU KNOW THEY TALKED BEFORE.....DAH
I get up and tell the commissioner my side of the story which was the truth. I had documents showing my capabilities in flying from a friend that has known me for along time. Also docs stating how this person reneged on buying other peoples aircraft.
The owner just had pics of his plane. Nothing but his word that I PURPOSELY CRASHED HIS PLANE.
She took the paper work and said that she will answer by mail. 2 to 4 weeks is when I should get the answer.
About 5 days later I get a letter stating that I owe $5000 and $102 court fees.
I COULD NOT BELIEVE THIS.
This kind of thing makes a person want to get out of the hobby.

Since this inncident I have heard from folks of the owner talking about RX battery problems and elevator servos that could not handle the strain at full throttle. Course, no one wants to come forward to say that to me. So I have no proof.

Let me tell you. If this guy told me about this I would have never touched this aircraft.
AGAIN THE PLANE WAS HANDED TO ME AT FULL THROTTLE AND NOTHING WAS SAID BY THE OWNER.

I feel like I have been set up bigtime as a scapegoat.

In my 30 yrs of doing this, I have never had this happen.

Something is wrong with this situation.

RichLockyer

The judgement is only as good as his ability to collect.
He can't garnish wages or lein your property without further court action, and if he takes it to a collection agency, he won't get the full amount anyways.

Ignore him.

If he starts making phone calls, document (and record) the calls. If he violates any of the terms of the Fair Credit Collection act, you've got him on a countersuit.

Wayne22

My Feedback: (2)

ouch!! Was anyone with you? or nearby?..if it was at an event, surely someone else witnessed the flight...

Steve S

My Feedback: (54)

Mann terrible situation to say the least!! I am very sorry to see you had to be dragged thru the ringer over this-sounds like to me that you did nothing wrong at all-you did all you could do to save his plane.It also sounds like to me that his bogus witness is the only thing that won it for him.Was this incident recent?how long ago? Court of law can only rule the verdict and assess the rewarded amount,they cant make you pay it ,at least not here in VA.I know all too well ,we been fighting for 4 years over a 40,000 lawsuit we won back in 2000.We won but its up to us to collect the money somehow,the courts cant order you to pay in it a small claims case matter.I doubt we will ever see the money,we pretty much wrote it off,meanwhile the SOB is using our equipment ,etc to make loads of cash at his near homstead-FL.

Steve

Geistware

My Feedback: (16)

If you do plan to pay, make sure that you get all the parts. You just purchased the plane, transmitter, and all. If he expects for you to pay, then all that stuff is yours.

kmurray

Good point. If he dose not have ALL the pieces he is only intitled to partial payment.

timrob

OUCH! I really feel for you. Isn't it terrible how someone else can ruin something you have obviously enjoyed over a long period of time.

Just reading this, and I don't know this other guy, but maybe you have been suckered into buying a new jet for the guy, who was sick of his 6 year old one which may or may not be having troubles??? It may be a scam where he rigged the jet to go in. I am sure there are many ways this could be done. It sounds as if his sole purpose of getting someone else to fly his plane, including very fast serving of court papers, is to get money (including having a guy front up to court to bad mount you). I don't know about you guys, but I wouldn't trust my very expensive piece of equipment to someone I didn't know well, and from what you say, he didn't know you apart from a few jet meets by sight. It all sounds very suspect to me, but I do love conspiracy theories!

Sorry to hear about your problem, I don't see any easy solution. Can you appeal the verdict? They always seem to be able to appeal the verdict on big cases? Is it different in small claims court? Maybe it is time to get legal help (or maybe you should have before the trial).

Good luck.

Tim.

kmurray

If this truely was his motive he could easly have had an accomplace at one end of the field or the other just waiting to intentionaly shoot you down.
This type of low life needs to be eliminated.

johnnyjet

My Feedback: (4)

Before I fly some ones (AKA test hop) aircraft I give this disclaimer:

If you built this aircraft correctly
If you set up the engine correctly
If you charged the battery correctly
If something does not fail in this aircraft.
If every thing is right.

I can fly this aircraft.

If not this aircraft may be lost.

Now do you want me to fly your aircraft?

But in lieu of the resent events it may be that a 0 liability contract is needed.

Johnny

DMehalko

My Feedback: (42)

Man im sorry, couldnt you just say hes lying, did you have a laywer?
Sounds like he knew something was wrong, and let someone else hold on to the tx when it failed so he could try to win a lawsuit and get money to buy a new plane

I feel for you,

David

pdmarsh

I won a case in small claims court a number of years ago (not hobby related). I was encouraged to take this action by a policeman. I had no idea that the defendant was not obligated to pay, in spite of the judgment. The judge said to me, in front of the defendant, "Now it's up to you to collect." I have never been paid. It's been about seven years. Now for the other side of the story. This defendant can never apply for credit, so I understand, without stating that they have a judgment against them. To do so would violate the law and lead to more serious charges. My wife and I, as the winning plaintiffs, made sure that we always kept the court records up to date as to our address and other contact information. So it may not be wise to ignore a judgement if you ever want to take out a new mortgage, or refinance, or even get another credit card. I would be looking for ways to fight this, if possible. I don't know if small claims judgements are final.

Thanks,
Paul

DAN AVILLA

My Feedback: (12)

I would turn it into your home owners. They should cover it. A judgment in Cailf. Will cause you problems in the future. It stll is not right. Dan Avilla []Norcal

garys

Unfortunately, bntwngbrd won't be able to ignore the judgement and never have to worry about it, at least for the next seven years. Like pdmarsh said, applying for credit will always bring up unpaid judgements. With credit cards, and even cars, they oftentimes don't matter as long as the rest of the credit is good, but with a home loan, it can make or break getting a new home. I'm a branch manager for a mortgage company, it's amazing how many times people have small unpaid judgements that they've ignored, or even forgotten about, that show up on their credit reports. If people want the best rates and programs available, they must not have any unpaid judgements, period. If they pay them while we're working on the loan, or even as late as the loan closing, it's fine. We can do loans without them paid, but the best ones require them to be paid. On the other end, if you are a plaintiff in a case, keep the court records updated. My office has been able to get numerous unpaid judgements off of people's credit because the courts were no longer able to contact the plaintiff.

Gary Schmidt
Team Futaba

HotelSierra

My Feedback: (9)

At the time of this incident, were you AMA Turbine Waiver certified?
The current president of the Madera club was at the field and witnessed the crash. His account of the incident was different than that which you described here. It is in question whether the Mig was being piloted with very much command & control. As a matter of fact, there were several Madera Club field rules broken during this flight that this incident resulted in getting turbine aircraft banned from their airfield. The president of the Madera club attended one of our meetings(Fresno Radio Modelers) and reported that this particular flight broke the max. altitude limit, flew beyond the "box" or allowable airspace and the airport manager from the adjacent full scale runway cited the aircraft for flying across the path of the takeoff/landing pattern on the active runway.

I myself am AMA turbine waiver certified and fly turbines. And in speaking on behalf of many turbine modelers, we are concerned about how incidents like these can jeopardize the future of our hobby.

If you were AMA Turbine Waiver Certified at the time of the incident than the lawsuit is unfortunate. If you did not have a turbine waiver then I think it is obvious how all this could have been prevented.

I know the president of the Madera club and will ask him to chime in on this thread.

By the way, after some difficult negotiating and positive communication with the club and the airport manager, turbine operations at Madera has been reallowed, however, under strict observation and scrutiny.

Dave03B

sorry mate, sounds an awful situ. There are some terrible people in this hobby! I've been waiting for a model now for 4 months from one bloke. He's stayed in contact with me, but since dec, thinks the model may have been stolen. He said I could have a refund, i accepted, but guess what! still no money!!!!!
what to do, what to do..............
These sort of things make me angry[>:]

diceman

My Feedback: (10)

I certainly can't coment on all that has been written about this subject, becaues it sounds like only you and he really know what happened. I will say this; If you are not a turbine certified pilot and he did not throughly invistigate this, you should have someone write to the AMA and have his turbine waiver suspended. That is the type of stuff everyone is now paying a lot of attention to.

Depending on how recent the action was taken, you may have the right of appeal. Act quickly though the time limit is usually about 30 days. If you don't pay he can hire a lawyer, and pay him to collect. Not sure where you are in the finanacial world, but how you deal with paying a debt is your decision.

Gordon Mc

My Feedback: (11)

Last time I flew at the MARCS club, I got the speech from a couple of club officers (Walt & Steve) about how they were not sure that they wanted me to fly my jet at the club because of the problems you describe above. I told them that the club's security was much more important than me getting a quick fix, so I'd happily leave the aircraft in the van if that was what they wanted, but that it might be better for them to constrain any pilots who bust the rules rather than banning aircraft types. They decided that I could fly, but that they would be watching my every move with great scrutiny. I tried for quite a while to get Walt (safety officer / field marshall) to come out to the flightline with me and give me his interpretations of acceptable flying (for those who do not know it, the club has a golf course close-by to the left, a full-scale airfield to the right, a 400 ft hard-cap due to full-scale ops that include skydivers, fixed-wing & helicoper ops directly over the club area, plus they fly from one end of a runway that is activley used by the crop-dusters - so obviously they have some pretty tight restrictions that can be tough to abide by if you are not constantly monitoring your position).

Anyway, I couldn't convince Walt, but I found one of the other officers more interested - can't remember his name, but he's the guy who's the prison warder. I spent at least an hour with him, explaining the turbine rules to him; explaining what the various bits in the aircraft were, and how startup works; telling him about the process we have to go through to get waivered and offering him (since I'm a turbine CD) to help him go through the process if he was interested in either getting his waiver or just understanding the process better; showing him what a turbine waiver looked like and explaining how the club should protect itself by asking to see the waiver for anyone flying a turbine (BTW, judging from the response I got, I think the AMA does a poor job of informing clubs what to look for); explaining about the AMA mandated safety aspects (extinguisher required, separation from other models on start-up, failsafe settings, fuel tank limits, etc) that should be expected of turbine pilots; etc., etc.; and then I had him go out and call for me for 3 flights. I flew where I believed was within the limits and constantly asked him for feedback to fine-tune my flying.

Overall, the experience ended up pretty positive, and either he was just being polite, or I managed to leave at least one club officer a little more informed about how seriously most of us take our responsibilities, and a little happier about the fact that turbine ops could fit within the club's rules. The tight restrictions definitley make MARCS less than my favorite place to fly jets (I've only flown turbines there 3 times in all my years of being a member) however its always better if the decision about flying jets at a given location is elective by the jet pilots rather than being a blanket enforcement by the club. For anyone else who is a turbine pilot that flies at MARCS ocasionally, please take the time to chat with any officers & other members present to try to help allay their concerns before you go fly. There's enough anti-turbine sentiment out there already, so your P.R. skills are vital and we all need to do our bit to help repair any damage (or ideally prevent it from happening in the first place).

Later,
Gordon

hanna

My Feedback: (3)

If the owner of the plane has a waiver and allowed someone without a waiver fly his turbine plane why is the owner not in violation of the turbine rules. This is a case where waiver pilots might show how the rules are complied with by moving to suspend the plane owners waiver. Mike Krizan. P. S.- This assumes there was no buddy box type flying....

Gordon Mc

My Feedback: (11)

He is.

The AMA has already been informed of the issue. However, until such time as the new rules are in place, I imagine that the AMA's reticence to revoke waivers due to lack of proper "process" will remain.

Given that buddy-box training is not permitted without a waiver until such time as the new rules are put in place, the use of a buddy-box would have been irrelevant even if one had been used in this case.

Gordon

hanna

My Feedback: (3)

Thanks Gordon. MK

warbird51

My Feedback: (12)

If I offer another flier the opportunity to fly my aircraft, then I have accepted the risk of them flying my aircraft. I am very particular about who flies my models and I have 3 close friends whom I regularly trade flights with. My feeling is that, if the model crashes with them at the controls, the results would have been the same if I had been flying. By offering the flight, the owner accepted the risks of letting the guy fly the model.

Wayne

Vincent

My Feedback: (61)

IMO the first mistake was Mike letting a non waivered pilot fly his jet. Also as we found out by an eye witness that maybe the jet was not quite in control as stated in the first post.I believe the jet was a CJM Mig-15 that Mike has owned for a few years and i have seen it fly ok.

bntwngbrd wrote:
<<This person comes up to me and asked me if I wanted some stick time on his Mig.>>

Why would someone you don`t even know just come up to you and want you to have some stick time on his expensive jet when you are not a jet pilot??
V..

edge_fanatic

My Feedback: (4)

I'm a bit unclear as to why you believe the full throttle hand-over is relevant to the incident...since you flew for three minutes or more thereafter.

And you mention several times that "nothing was said by the owner...". About what? The supposed battery problems?

Finally, you say you brought docs talking about the other guy reneging on buying folks' airplanes, but I fail to see how this is relevant to the issue the court had in front of them. (impeachment as a witness?)

Out of curiousity, did you know this guy before? Had you heard about him? Did you know his work? Had the plane been in the air earlier that day? Prior to flying the plane, did you ask if it had any recent radio issues or other problems?

Sorry to hear about the incident.

Good Luck!

Vacman

My Feedback: (14)

I didn't read anything in this thread as to WHY the airplane didn't correct with right Aileron command. Was the on-board battery and/or transmitter checked for enough voltage? Silly question, but it seems to me one would want to know why this accident happened and indeed, THAT fact might have some bearing on the matter. I flew a digitized Extra 330L today. After two flights, I landed and no sooner after touching down, all controls went dead. The 1400 mAH pack on board measured 3.75 volts and dropping (and it wasn't my plane!).

VA

My Feedback: (1)

In my line of work there ae 3 sides to every story. Yours , his and the absolute fact. Bottomline is you were at the stick when it went in. Crappy situation and my gut feeling is you were hosed and the suit is funding his next big project. Bottomline is dont take control of another persons aircraft unless you are prepared to pay for damages that occur at your control. Especially a high end jet in the thousands of dollars, just bad judgement. How long did u know this person when this happened?
In any case you can pay this character back one dollar per month to keep him off your back and it will have the positive side effect of aggravating the crap out of him to cash or deposit it. A valuable lesson learned here.