James Price, Macy Price Sr. and Macy Price Jr. prepare to go trout fishing at a stream on their 39,000-acre Argentina ranch, in this undated photo. Macy Price Sr. and Macy Price Jr. died May 10, 2000, when their private jet crashed on Molokai.
Isle crash lawsuit
settled for $3.5MThe NTSB had ruled that
the accident on Molokai was
due to an error by the pilot
The family of two men killed in the crash of their private jet on Molokai four years ago have settled a lawsuit for $3.5 million against an aircraft company and the deceased pilot and co-pilot.
"The family felt this was pilot error," Honolulu attorney Richard Fried said yesterday.
Fried was one of the attorneys who represented the family of Macy Price Sr., 70, and his son Macy Price Jr., 38, in a negligence suit filed in U.S. District Court in 2001.
The suit was filed on behalf of the elder Price's two other children, James Price and Britt Sutter, of Colorado, and his ex-wife and the younger Price's mother, Marjorie Price. Neither man was married at the time of the crash.
Family members could not be reached yesterday for comment.
Robert Taylor, president of Wichita, Kan.-based Executive Aircraft, which was sued by the Price family, could not be reached for comment. Their attorney, Burnham Greely also could not be reached.
Price Sr. and his son were business partners who built their fortune in a computer storage company, Engineered Data Products, based in Golden, Colo. Fried said the two worked 12- to 16-hour days for years building the business and then sold it for more than $60 million about a year before the crash.
Fried said Price owned a 39,000-acre ranch in southern Argentina and a home on Molokai that he and his son frequently visited.
Fried said the two were on their way home from Argentina and had stopped in Tahiti before flying to Maui on their way to Molokai.
About 8:44 p.m. May 10, 2000, the Prices were on board their Rockwell Sabreliner corporate jet when it "clipped the top of the hill approaching the Kaunakakai Airport," said Fried.
Everyone was killed on impact, said Fried. In addition to the Prices, the others killed in the crash were pilot Bill Marr, 63; co-pilot Jason Miller, 28; Laurel Marr, 63, the pilot's wife; and Delilah Deterding, 20, a family friend of the Prices.
Marr was a pilot for the Price family's company, Price Aircraft, and Miller was employed by Executive Aircraft.
In July 2002 the National Transportation Safety Board attributed the crash to pilot error but was unable to determine whether errors in their flight decisions were due to fatigue.
The NTSB investigation determined that the pilot and co-pilot made a number of errors in preparing to land on Molokai. Had the jet been 100 feet higher, investigators said, it would not have slammed into the mountain slope about four miles from the airport.
The NTSB found that the pilots chose the wrong frequency to turn on the airport's runway lighting and mistakenly concluded that the airport was socked in by clouds despite weather information to the contrary. They terminated instrument approach and proceeded visually.
The NTSB report said pilots approaching a dark runway on featureless terrain sometimes experience an illusion that the plane is flying at a higher altitude than it really is. In response to this illusion, sometimes referred to as "black hole" phenomenon, the pilot might try to fly lower, making his overall approach too low for a safe landing.
