Aviation Litigation

American Airlines Flight 965, a Boeing 757-200 operating from Miami International Airport to Alfonso Bonilla Aragón International Airport in Cali, Colombia, crashed into El Diluvio mountain in the Andes at approximately 9:40 PM local time. Of the 163 people on board, 159 perished — making it the deadliest aviation accident in Colombian history and, at the time, the most catastrophic accident involving a Boeing 757.

The flight crew — Captain Nicholas Tafuri, with over 13,000 hours of experience, and First Officer Donald Williams, with nearly 6,000 — were both highly skilled aviators. What killed them, and the 157 others aboard, was not pilot error alone. It was a defect in the navigation database that powered the aircraft's Flight Management System.

As Flight 965 descended toward Cali, the crew accepted a direct approach to runway 19, which required navigating to the Rozo NDB — a radio beacon near the airport identified as "R" on their Jeppesen approach chart.

When the captain entered "R" into the Flight Management Computer to navigate to Rozo, the FMC did not return Rozo. Instead, it returned Romeo — a completely different NDB located near Bogotá, 150 nautical miles to the northeast.

The root cause was a critical defect in the Honeywell FMC and the Jeppesen navigation database:

• Duplicate identifiers within the same ICAO region. Both the Rozo NDB near Cali and the Romeo NDB near Bogotá used the single-letter identifier "R." ICAO standards in effect since 1978 prohibited duplicate identifiers unless the beacons were more than 600 nautical miles apart. These two were only 150 nautical miles apart — a clear violation. The database should never have allowed the conflict to exist.
• The FMC displayed the wrong beacon first. When the captain typed "R" and selected from the list, the FMC presented Romeo — not Rozo — as the top result. The system provided no warning that two beacons shared the same identifier or that the selected waypoint was 150 miles in the wrong direction.
• No alerting, no cross-check, no protection. Neither Honeywell's FMC nor Jeppesen's database provided any alert to the crew that a duplicate identifier conflict existed. The system silently redirected the autopilot toward Bogotá. By the time the error was detected, the 757 was in the wrong valley, on a collision course with a 9,800-foot mountain.

The aircraft struck El Diluvio mountain at approximately 9,700 feet. There were four survivors.

American Airlines brought suit against Honeywell International, manufacturer of the Flight Management Computer, and Jeppesen Sanderson, the publisher of the navigation database loaded into the FMC. The central claim: the navigation database was defective, the FMC failed to protect the crew from an identifier conflict that should never have existed, and the defendants' products — not the crew — were the proximate cause of the disaster.

Legal-eze handled all litigation graphics and trial presentation for the American Airlines case. Our team built the exhibits that explained, visually and precisely, how a single database defect — a duplicate beacon identifier in violation of longstanding ICAO standards — caused a modern commercial jet to turn toward the wrong mountain and kill 159 people.

The litigation required exhibits that could take an aviation system most jurors had never heard of — the Flight Management Computer — and make its failure so clear that there was no room for doubt. Our team produced:

• Flight path reconstruction maps. Geographic exhibits showing the aircraft's intended routing into Cali versus the actual turn toward Bogotá — including terrain overlays, mountain elevations, and the point of impact.
• FMC navigation database exhibits. Step-by-step visual breakdowns of how the "R" identifier conflict existed in the database, how the system presented Romeo instead of Rozo, and how ICAO standards expressly prohibited the duplication that caused the error.
• Cockpit sequence timeline. A precise, second-by-second reconstruction of the crew's actions in the final minutes of flight — correlated with CVR transcript, FDR data, and ATC communications — showing the moment the wrong waypoint was selected and the chain of events that followed.
• System design comparison exhibits. Demonstrating that a properly designed database and FMC would have flagged the duplicate identifier, presented the correct beacon, or warned the crew of the conflict — and that Honeywell and Jeppesen had the capability and the obligation to build that protection in.