FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) _ A judge on Friday blamed the crew of a Delta Air Lines jet for a 1985 crash that killed 137 people, even though air traffic controllers had failed to warn the crew of severe weather.
In a 72-page opinion, U.S. District Judge David O. Belew Jr. said Delta had failed to prove that the National Weather Service and controllers at the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport were negligent.
In the longest major aviation trial in U.S. history, attorneys for Delta had argued that the weather was to blame for the crash because crew members didn’t have sufficient warning about the severity of a thunderstorm at the airport.
The airline had sought to make the government pay all or part of the millions of dollars in claims arising from the crash.
