Bringuier, et al v. Aero Investment Corp., et al

Filing

OPINION issued by Bruce M. Selya, Appellate Judge; David H. Souter, Associate Supreme Court Justice and Kermit V. Lipez, Appellate Judge. Unpublished. [13-1640]

Case: 13-1640

Document: 00116806455

Page: 1

Date Filed: 03/04/2015

Entry ID: 5890453

Not for Publication in West's Federal Reporter

United States Court of Appeals
For the First Circuit
No. 13-1640
ZULAIKA RODRIGUEZ DELGADO,
T.I.O.R., a minor, and J.M.B., a minor,
Plaintiffs, Appellants,
v.
AERO INVESTMENT CORP.,
Defendant, Appellee.

APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE DISTRICT OF PUERTO RICO
[Hon. Aida M. Delgado-Colón, U.S. District Judge]

Before
Selya, Circuit Judge,
Souter,* Associate Justice,
and Lipez, Circuit Judge.

Álvaro R. Calderón Jr., Adriana G. Sánchez-Parés, Francisco J.
Ortiz-García, and Álvaro R. Calderón Jr. LLP, for appellants.
Jaime F. Agrait Llado, Eric D. Griffin Jr., Agrait-Llado Law
Firm, and Griffin Serrano, P.A., for appellees.

March 4, 2015

*

Hon. David H. Souter, Associate Justice (Ret.) of the
Supreme Court of the United States, sitting by designation.

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SOUTER, Associate Justice.

Date Filed: 03/04/2015

Entry ID: 5890453

A small passenger plane flying

from the Dominican Republic met with a violent storm and crashed
into shallow seas off Puerto Rico, killing the pilot and all five
passengers.

The appellants are the pilot's child, the child's

mother, and another of her children, against whom the district
court entered summary judgment in their diversity jurisdiction
negligence action against Aero Investment Corporation, which had
installed an allegedly defective magneto in the plane's engine and
performed subsequent maintenance work on it.

Aero tested the

engine's performance after the installation and at least two more
times, with a possible third test said to have been done just
before the fatal flight.

In ruling on Aero's motion for summary

judgment under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 56, the district
court analyzed a number of contentious issues, in the course of
which it accepted Aero's claim that appellants had not furnished
evidence from which a trier of fact could find a causal connection
between any fault on Aero's part and the crash of the plane.

We

affirm on the same ground of lack of causation, albeit on a theory
pressed in the district court and before us but upon which the
district court did not rely in granting summary judgment.
We

review

summary

judgment

de

novo,

under

the

familiar

standard that views the evidentiary record in the light most
legitimately favorable to the party against whom judgment is
sought, in determining whether there is no genuine dispute about

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material facts entitling the moving party to judgment as a matter
of law.

Genereux v. Raytheon Co., 754 F.3d 51, 54 (1st Cir. 2014).

Despite myriad factual disagreements on subsidiary issues, the
evidence bearing on the standard requirement of proving proximate
cause between any negligence and injury, see P.R. Laws Ann. tit.
31, § 5141; Vázquez–Filippetti v. Banco Popular de P.R., 504 F.3d
43, 49 (1st Cir. 2007), may be described in the manner most
favorable to the appellants fairly succinctly.
The plane was owned by a corporation not a party to this
appeal.

Another third party reconditioned two engine magnetos,

devices that produce the sparks that fire the plane's engines. The
left magneto suffered from defective internal wiring when inspected
after the accident, thus carrying the potential to fire the engine
erratically and weaken its power.

Aero installed the magnetos,1

but there is no evidence that Aero or anyone else was aware of
inadequate

wiring

in

the

magneto

1

and

no

evidence

that

an

It is unclear whether appellants press a negligence claim
based on improper installation, as opposed to inadequate
maintenance, of the faulty magneto. In any event, summary judgment
was appropriate on an installation theory. Although appellants'
expert witness, Colin Sommer, testified that the magneto was
"improperly" installed, that otherwise unexplained conclusory
statement is inadequate to raise a factual issue of negligent
installation. See Vineberg v. Bissonnette, 548 F.3d 50, 56 (1st
Cir. 2008). Moreover, although appellants' experts testified that
if Aero had examined the left magneto on installation (presumably
by disassembling it to some extent) it would have found the wiring
defect, there was no testimony or other evidence showing an
industry standard of reasonable care that required an installer
like Aero to do a partial disassembly of the independent
reconditioner's work before making the installation. See id.
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imperfection had manifested itself in any way in the course of
periodic tests by Aero and some 250 hours of flying time between
installation

and

the

period

immediately

preceding

the

crash.

Shortly before the plane went down, the pilot spoke by radio with
a Puerto Rican traffic controller, but his stated reason was only
to obtain permission to deviate from his original flight plan, to
avoid severe weather ahead. After the pilot received authorization
to do that, and the plane descended to a lower altitude, witnesses
on the ground heard what they took to be irregular firing of the
engine.

Although the pilot made no further radio contact, the

plane then flew into the storm itself, which was so violent that
control was impossible.

The crash in shallow water followed.

In the district court and before us, much effort was devoted
to arguing whether there was a basis in evidence to claim (or
dispute) that engine malfunction caused the pilot to allow the
plane to veer suddenly into the destructive weather that he had
obviously meant to avoid.
issue,

which

is

relevant

But there is no need to resolve this
only

if

appellants

have

evidence

connecting the source of any engine malfunction with a negligent
failure to discover it on Aero's part; and they have no such
evidentiary basis in the record.
The nub of the negligence action against Aero is that its
tests of the running engine were inadequate, and appellants make
two such claims.

The first of them, that Aero failed to perform a

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necessary inspection just prior to the fatal flight, rests on
expert witness, Luis Irizarry-Porrata, who testified that, after
the crash was known, he saw an Aero employee making entries in the
required record-keeping book to document the inspection claimed to
have been made days before. Irizarry-Porrata took this to indicate
that the inspection had never been completed.

Although it is

questionable whether this conclusion is adequately supported,2 this
issue, too, need not be resolved, owing to the insufficiency of the
causation evidence made apparent in the course of presenting the
second claim of testing inadequacy.
The second claim turns on a dispute over whether, in doing the
testing, the Aero employees ran the engine at 1800 r.p.m. (the
speed suggested by the plane's manufacturer) or at 2200 r.p.m. (as
suggested by the engine's manufacturer). The expert witness Sommer
understood the evidence to indicate 1800 r.p.m. had been used, at
which speed he found it less "likely" that the defective magneto
would produce the irregular ignition that would indicate a defect.
But

he

also

testified

that

sparking

irregularity

would

be

"intermittent at most" even at the higher speed and that Aero's
employees

could

have

run

the

engine

producing any noticeable irregularity.

at

2200

r.p.m.

without

All he could say was that

an irregularity would be "more likely" to show up at the higher

2

The evidence was that the book entries were pre-existing
computer entries, then being printed out and posted in the book.
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speed, but he offered no opinion on how likely it would show up at
any speed.

So far as the evidence shows, the likelihood of an

irregular spark during a standard test duration might have been one
in a hundred at 1800 r.p.m. and two in a hundred at 2200 r.p.m.
The record provides no way to tell.
Thus, even if we assume for argument that Aero tested at 1800
r.p.m. or failed to complete a test or both, there is no evidence
from which a trier of fact could conclude by a preponderance that
a test viewed by the expert as adequate, complete, and consistent
with due care at 2200 r.p.m. would have alerted Aero's people to a
defect and led them to refuse to approve the plane's operation.
Consequently, even if we assume that Aero failed to exercise due
care, there is no evidence that due care would, to a degree of
preponderance, have avoided the result.
We think Aero's counsel is correct to argue that this absence
of causal evidence places this case in the same posture as the one
described by the Supreme Court in Celotex Corp. v. Catrett:
In our view, the plain language of Rule 56(c) mandates
the entry of summary judgment, after adequate time for
discovery and upon motion, against a party who fails to
make a showing sufficient to establish the existence of
an element essential to that party's case, and on which
that party will bear the burden of proof at trial. In
such a situation, there can be no genuine issue as to any
material fact, since a complete failure of proof
concerning an essential element of the nonmoving party's
case necessarily renders all other facts immaterial. The
moving party is entitled to a judgment as a matter of law
because the nonmoving party has failed to make a
sufficient showing on an essential element of her case
with respect to which she has the burden of proof.
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477 U.S. 317, 322-23 (1986) (internal quotation marks omitted).
The order of summary judgment is affirmed.

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