Family Of Brazil Crash Victim Files Suit Against TAM, Airbus In Miami
Relatives of a man who died in Brazil’s worst air disaster have filed suit in U.S. federal court seeking damages from the airline and the plane’s European manufacturer, lawyers said Tuesday.The suit filed late Friday in Miami seeks unspecified damages from TAM Linhas Aereas SA and Airbus SAS for the death of Ricardo Tazoe, a 35-year-old Peruvian-American, lawyer Ricardo M. Martinez-Cid said.
Tazoe, an employee of Banco Santander in Miami, Florida, was one of 187 people aboard TAM flight 3054 when it skidded off the runway at Sao Paulo’s Congonhas airport and slammed into air cargo building killing everyone aboard. Twelve people on the ground were also killed.
Martinez-Cid said he believes the Miami court has jurisdiction because both TAM and Airbus do business in Miami and Tazoe lived there with his wife and two children.
“We’ve already been contacted by a number of lawyers of families who lost loved ones in the crash,” Martinez-Cid said in a telephone interview from Miami. “Any case in the U.S. is worth many times more than any case in Brazil.”
Investigators have yet to determine the cause of the crash, but suspicion has fallen on everything from problems with the jet’s thrust reverser, to pilot error, to the short-slippery runway at Congonhas that provides little margin of error for pilots attempting land.
Also named in the suit are International Aero Engines, which manufactured the plane’s thrust reverser, and Goodrich Corp., an aerospace and defense parts supplier, which in addition to manufacturing the braking systems, has a contract with TAM to maintain the thrust reversers, Martinez-Cid said.
TAM’s press office said they could not comment on the lawsuit because they had not been notified about it. Spokesmen at Airbus, a unit of the European Aeronautic Defence & Space Co., could not be immediately reached to comment on the lawsuit.