Piper Lance victim’s heirs awarded €288,000 in damages

The family of the 1995 Piper Lance accident victim Philip Farrugia, have been awarded €288,000 in damages from two companies and the heirs of the pilot responsible for the incident.

Farrugia was a driller working on an oil rig in Libya. He was on the Piper Lance on his way to Malta when the plane disappeared on 3 December, 1995 carrying six travellers: three Maltese citizens, an Englishman, an Irish national and a Polish national.

The Piper Lance PA-32R-300 aircraft is believed to have disappeared on the way to Malta from Djerba Airport, crashing in an area between Tunisia and Malta. But notwithstanding that a board of inquiry was set up to unravel the circumstances in which the plane disappeared, the evidence has been inconclusive: the plane allegedly took off from Djerba Airport at 4:41am and went missing just before crossing the Maltese flight information region boundary, at 5:11am.

The reports of distress signals that had been received during the following days have never been confirmed exactly to this day.

In October 1996, Tunisian fishermen brought up the wallet and the keys of the pilot together with some debris in their nets.

The wife of Philip Farrugia, Grace, and children Rachel Portelli and Angie Farrugia filed for damages against Sun Aviation Ltd, Excelair Ltd and the heirs of pilot Carmelo Bartolo.

The court today ordered the three parties to pay the damages with interest as from today. The court said that Bartolo took the decision to carry out the flight, a decision which led to the death of six people and destroyed a number of families, including his own.

Excelair Ltd was the company that organised the trip and Sun Aviation Ltd had permitted its aircraft to be used for a commercial flight when it was not licenced for such flight and when the pilot did not have a licence to carry out a commercial flight.

Mr Justice Anthony Ellul said that under normal circumstances, and irrelevant of their size, planes do not crash without human error. The court heard enough evidence to conclude that incident happened because of the negligence of the late pilot Carmelo Bartolo. The fact that the plane had an airworthiness certificate meant nothing as the incident happened almost a year after this was issued, and the final decision to take to the skies was that of the pilot.

Lawyers Joseph Gatt and David Camilleri appeared for the Farrugia family.