Sikorsky Aircraft has reached an undisclosed settlement with the families of three people who were killed in a military helicopter crash in 2021.
The MH-60S Seahawk was attempting to land on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific following a rescue mission in August 2021. The helicopter rotor blades clipped the deck during landing and the helicopter flipped over the side of the vessel.
The two pilots of the aircraft, Lt. Bradley Foster and Lt. Paul Fridley, were killed, along with hospital corpsmen Sarah Burns and Bailey Tucker, and naval air crewman James Buriak.
One person survived the crash, but five more on the deck of the aircraft carrier were injured by flying debris.
The families of Buriak, Burns and Tucker sued the Stratford-based helicopter maker, claiming the crash was due to a defect in the aircraft. The helicopter experienced severe vibrations during the landing maneuver, something that a Navy investigation later attributed to the failure of one of four hoses in the main rotor damper system.
The families had claimed in their suit that the failure was due to a design defect in the aircraft, saying they believed a break in any of the four damper hoses would result in a loss of pressure in all four dampers.
“The location of the hydraulic damper hoses rendered them susceptible to kinking
and other damage from the spindle pry bar during maintenance on the main rotor system,” the complaint alleges. “There were no adequate inspection criteria to detect mechanical damage to the damper hoses from bending or kinking.”
In answering the suit, Sikorsky conceded that a Navy investigation concluded “the damper system likely lost hydraulic pressure because of mechanical damage caused by the failure to disconnect the damper hose during maintenance.”
But the company denied that it caused or contributed to the accident.
Sikorsky is a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin.
