Page 24 - EAA78.Newsletter.Archives.(February.2017-July.2021)

Experimental Aircraft Association
Delaware Valley, Pennsylvania
Doylestown Airport (KDYL)
3879 Old Easton Rd.
Doylestown, PA 18902
Meets: Last Wed each of month (7:30 PM)
CHAPTER CHATTER
Chapter Number 78
Piper airplanes break up in
midair, a dozen lawsuits assert
The sky was overcast and the temperature was in the
40s on that dreary November day when Mary Ann
Renick, her daughter Desiree, 8, and friend Barbara
Lane took off from Boston for a 3½-hour flight home to
Clarksburg, W.Va.
Renick, a single mother, had never flown before. She
and her daughter had traveled to Boston to discuss
surgery for Desiree to correct her cleft palate. They
were on a so-called angel flight, in which private pilots
fly needy patients to distant medical appointments for
free.
For a time, the trip was uneventful, but 90 minutes into
the flight, three violent bumps shattered the reverie,
Renick later recalled. Suddenly, the plane was coming
apart at 10,000 feet and wind was roaring through the
passenger compartment. Renick reached desperately for
Desiree while fighting against her seat belt, which had
wound around her neck and begun to strangle her.
“I kept struggling and struggling,” Renick said. “I
knew I was going to die.”
January, 2018
Volume 42, Number 01
Flying Through History
But Renick and pilot Rolf Mielzarek survived when
part of the plane’s passenger compartment, left wing,
and engine landed in a tree, leaving Renick suspended
high above the ground.
Her daughter and friend weren’t so lucky; both died
from injuries sustained in the crash. Wreckage was
strewn over an area two miles long and a half-mile
wide. Afterward, the National Transportation Safety
Board found that the plane's front nose assembly broke
apart midflight, causing the crash in Lehman Township
in the Poconos on Nov. 6, 1996.
But it wasn't the only Piper to break up midflight over
the years.
The plane that Renick and her daughter flew in is one
of hundreds of Piper Aircraft planes that have
disintegrated midflight due to a design flaw the
company has refused to acknowledge and correct, assert
a team of Philadelphia plaintiffs’ lawyers who have
filed more than a dozen lawsuits against the company.
Piper’s Stabilator
The pilot uses the stabilator to control the plane as it
is ascending and descending. Plaintiffs’ lawyers
claim that the stabilators on Piper aircraft can
become unstable and cause the plane to break up
under certain flight conditions.