KOMO-TV Seattle, its aviation contractor and the estate of the station’s late pilot will pay $40 million to two men who were injured when a news helicopter nose-dived off the station’s rooftop near Seattle’s Space Needle four years ago and crashed into their cars.
According to The Seattle Times, the settlement, read in open court Monday, came after testimony and new records emerged in the final stages of the weekslong civil trial bolstering contentions by surviving crash victims Guillermo Sanchez and Richard Newman that Sinclair Broadcast-owned KOMO and its contractor, Helicopters Inc., ignored long-standing safety concerns about landing on the station’s rooftop helipad.
In depositions leading up to the case, officials for the contractor had “already admitted they and KOMO were liable for this accident” — by violating safety terms in their contract and conceding the pilot had made a mistake, said David Beninger, the Seattle attorney who represented Newman.
“Then, they spent a lot of time during this trial trying to walk that admission back,” Beninger added. “At the end of the day, the evidence was pretty overwhelming — this was the wrong pilot with the wrong helicopter landing in the wrong place.”
Under the settlement, neither KOMO nor Helicopters Inc. admitted wrongdoing for the fiery crash on March 18, 2014, that killed veteran pilot Gary Pfitzner and photojournalist Bill Strothman, and injured Sanchez and Newman as they sat in their vehicles on a street next to the news station.
During an April 2017 deposition, Helicopter Inc.’s vice president of operations, Jeffrey Lieber, testified his firm felt pressured by KOMO to land at the rooftop helipad instead of Renton Municipal Airport because KOMO wanted to save money on fuel by using its own fuel tank on the helipad.
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