From Arlington website:

Sunday, January 08, 2006:

On a cold January day almost two years ago, family members and friends of five Special Forces servicemen killed in an Air Force helicopter crash in Afghanistan gathered at Arlington National Cemetery for their burial, receiving folded American flags and honored by a military flyover and a seven-gun salute.

The servicemen were memorialized at the ceremony by a Chaplain, Colonel David E. Boyles, as "five brave young men who gave their lives not only for their country, but for friends and family, to keep them free."

Now, the widows of three of the men are suing defense contractors for the wrongful deaths of their husbands in the 2003 crash, which the Air Force blamed on engine failure of the MH-53M Pave Low helicopter caused in part by failure of auxiliary fuel tanks to jettison.

While not unheard of, such lawsuits in wartime are uncommon, and frequently involve sensitive information about military hardware that the government doesn't want in open court.

"These are difficult cases to win, but it is not impossible," said Randall Craft, an attorney with the Holland & Knight law firm who specializes in aviation liability issues.

According to an Air Force accident report, the Pave Low flight dubbed "Beatle 12" carrying 13 passengers and crew crashed Nov. 23, 2003, about five minutes after it lifted off from Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.

The helicopter, which can carry up to 55 people, was part of a Special Operations "infiltration" mission in the war against Taliban and al-Qaida fighters during Operation Mountain Resolve. The aircraft was on its third sortie of the day.

A compressor problem caused one of the two engines on the Pave Low to stall, leaving it with one engine operating and far too much weight to carry in the thin mountain air. The pilots "attempted to jettison the auxiliary tanks without success" and then the other engine stalled while an emergency landing was being attempted, the Air Force concluded.

With all power lost, the helicopter fell from an altitude of about 200 feet onto an uneven river bank, rolled over and burst into flames. Eight people somehow managed to survive - but four Air Force personnel and one Army officer were killed.

Their remains were difficult to identify and were buried together at Arlington under a single tombstone bearing all five names. Those killed were: Air Force Staff Sergeant Thomas A. Walkup Jr. of Millville, New Jersey; Air Force Major Steven Plumhoff of Neshanic Station, New Jersey; Air Force Tech Sergeants Howard A. Walters of Port Huron, Michigan, and William J. Kerwood of Houston, Missouri; and Army Sergeant Major Phillip R. Albert of Terryville, Connecticut.

Walters, Kerwood and Walkup were all assigned to Hurlburt Field, Florida. Plumhoff's home base was Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M.; Albert was assigned to Fort Drum, New York.

Widows Melissa Walters, Kara Kerwood and Yvette LaPointe-Plumhoff have filed lawsuits in federal court in Miami accusing the Pave Low's maker, Sikorsky Aircraft Corp., and two fuel tank installation and maintenance companies of negligence that led to the crash. The lawsuits seek an unspecified amount of damages.

None of the women responded to requests for comment for this article.

The Air Force accident report, which by law cannot be used as evidence in civil lawsuits, concluded that there was "insufficient written guidance" available to check on the status of the fuel tank jettison system. The lawsuits contend that Sikorsky, Lear Siegler Services Inc. and Smiths Aerospace LLC never instructed maintenance personnel to perform necessary electrical tests to assure the tanks would drop in an emergency.
"The jettison system was indispensable to the ability of the MH-53M crew to avoid a crash by rapidly reducing the helicopter's weight in the event one of the two engines failed during flight," says one of the lawsuits.

The widows also claim in their lawsuits that the tank design was faulty because it had no backup jettison system. Sikorsky, a unit of defense contractor United Technologies Corp., denies that its aircraft or maintenance schedules were to blame, saying that the Pave Low and its operation "met the standards of the state-of-the-art, scientific knowledge" and that no red flags had been raised about any defects in the fuel tanks. Sikorsky also contends that it had no control over possible "misuse" of the helicopter by the Air Force.

Lear Siegler also denied any liability. Smiths Aerospace said it has not yet confirmed whether it actually supplied the tanks on the Pave Low, but spokeswoman Jennifer Villarreal said in an e-mail that the company has begun a review of the tanks and related equipment as a result of the crash.
"To date, we have not identified any problems with this equipment," she said.

The judge presiding over the case, U.S. District Court Judge Ursula Ungaro Benages, has not yet set a trial date but the lawsuits have been consolidated into a single proceeding.

Kerwood, William Jo, MSgt