How to Recover from an Accident at Gulfstream Aerospace Corporation

• August 7, 2024
• Attorney Matt Stoddard
• Warehouse Accidents

Gulfstream Aerospace is an aircraft manufacturer headquartered here in Georgia, with facilities around the country. The company’s main local aircraft plant in Savannah covers 142,000 square feet of space and employs roughly 11,500 people, as of its latest expansion.

Maintaining a safe workspace for that many people is a huge responsibility, and unfortunately, Gulfstream hasn’t always been up to the task.

Gulfstream Aerospace Plants Have Struggled with Typical Factory Safety Issues

Whether a factory makes airplanes, textiles, or breakfast cereals, many of the perils of manufacturing work are the same. Fires, explosions, falls from heights, shocks from electrical systems, exposure to hazardous chemicals, and getting caught in or struck by heavy machinery are all common hazards affecting factory workers across countless industries.

All of these types of accidents are generally preventable with good workplace design and safety policies, but like most manufacturing companies, Gulfstream has a far from spotless record.

• In December of 2017, a Gulfstream employee in Cahokia, Illinois slipped and fell off of a ladder that had been mounted to an aircraft as a walking and working surface. In addition to the makeshift nature of the platform, the employee was apparently not wearing fall protection, and fractured a vertebra on impact with the hangar’s concrete floor.
• Farther back, in July of 2008, an explosion at the local Gulfstream plant in Savannah injured three people. Two contractors were reportedly testing tanks for oxygen leaks when the ignition occurred. The third victim was a Gulfstream employee who rushed in to help.
• Just two years earlier, also in the Savannah plant, one employee discovered another hanging from the maintenance panel of an aircraft, touched him, and felt an electrical charge running through his body. Further investigation of the scene confirmed that the man in the plane was dead, with electrical burns to both arms and an extension cord in his hands, which he had apparently been using to light his work space.
• Two more years before that, another Gulfstream employee was crushed to death in Appleton, Wisconsin, between a malfunctioning scissor lift and an aircraft.

If you have also been injured or lost a loved one to an accident in a Gulfstream plant, you should know that industrial accidents are rarely freak occurrences. They’re almost always the result of a safety policy or early warning sign being ignored.

Safety Experts Have Accused Gulfstream of Endangering Lives to Keep a Schedule

Factories and maintenance facilities aren’t the only places where Gulfstream employees perform work and face danger. As an aviation company, Gulfstream also performs its own test flights on its products.

Test flights are a notoriously dangerous step in the development of new aircraft. They’re also absolutely necessary, to make sure the aircraft is safe for its intended use, and to establish effective protocols for handling potential problems. As with all necessary and inherently dangerous jobs, however, the level of risk is variable. Sensible safety policies reduce it, while recklessness increases it. The way a company treats employee safety during a short, high-risk project like a test flight can often provide a snapshot of how that same company treats safety in the factory setting, where more employees face less glamorous risks over a longer period of time.

In 2011, during a test of Gulfstream’s then-experimental G650 business jet, the plane crashed less than a minute after takeoff and caught fire. All four Gulfstream employees on board — two flight test pilots and two flight test engineers — were killed.

The investigation that followed determined that the victims had survived the initial crash, but were unable to escape the plane in time to survive the blaze. The chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) also noted that there had been two previous close calls during the testing of the plane, and that Gulfstream failed to analyze the data from those incidents before continuing with its “aggressive” flight test schedule.

It’s possible the information available from those past tests could have saved these four lives.

Gulfstream Is Immune to Most Lawsuits from Workers and Their Families

Ordinarily, if a company knows (or should know) about a danger involving its products or property, and it fails to eliminate that danger or warn people in a timely manner, that’s grounds for a lawsuit from anyone who gets hurt.

When it comes to the workplace, however, the rules are different. Worker’s comp law in the U.S grants employers immunity to almost all personal injury and wrongful death lawsuits related to on-the-job accidents. Instead, employers are required to carry worker’s comp insurance, to cover expenses for work-related injuries.

Worker’s comp covers all workplace accidents that result in injury or death, regardless of who’s at fault. The downside is that this coverage only applies to approved medical expenses and a portion of lost income, typically two-thirds. For victims of employer negligence, this is much less than what a lawsuit would be worth.

To make matters worse, big employers like Gulfstream often require employees to sign an arbitration agreement, which bars them from suing even in situations where employer immunity wouldn’t normally apply.

While employer protections against lawsuits are powerful, they’re not airtight, and courts do sometimes push back when big companies try to make themselves completely unaccountable for their actions.

In May of 2023, the California Court of Appeals called the wording of Gulfstream’s arbitration agreement “unconscionable,” and allowed an employee to sue the company for discrimination in civil court.

Even in cases of workplace accidents, employer immunity has its limits. For one thing, it only covers formal employer/employee relationships, so workers classified as independent contractors still have the right to sue. Employer immunity can also be rendered void if the employer tries to stop an injured worker from accessing the worker’s comp benefits due to them.

Gulfstream opened itself up to litigation in exactly this way back in the early 2000s. At that time, Gulfstream was self-insured, meaning that it had made a commitment to pay for all worker’s comp benefits directly, instead of paying a monthly premium to a separate company for coverage. When a worker requested reimbursement from Gulfstream for the cost of a prescription medication for a work-related neck injury, Gulfstream wrote a check for less than half of the cost. Worker’s comp court twice ordered Gulfstream to pay the employee in full, but Gulfstream ignored both orders. Ultimately, the employee was allowed to sue Gulfstream for bad faith conduct in civil court.

The Stoddard Firm May Be Able to Help You Without Suing Gulfstream Directly

Although opportunities for an employee to sue a negligent employer are rare, workaround options, thankfully, are not.

If you’ve been injured in the course of your employment with Gulfstream Aerospace, your best course of action will most likely be to sue a third-party company that played a role in your accident. Employer immunity only applies to your direct employer, and like all factories, Gulfstream plants rely on multiple companies and organizations to keep them running smoothly and safely.

Depending on the details of your accident, some valid defendants for a lawsuit might include:

• The manufacturer of any equipment you were using that may have malfunctioned, or lacked necessary safety features.
• Any company that has modified or serviced the equipment you were using, and may have made it more dangerous or overlooked critical warning signs.
• The manufacturer of any personal protective equipment you were using that failed.
• The distributor of any chemicals that turned out to be needlessly hazardous or lacked adequate warning labels.
• Any safety inspection or consultation services that approved your working environment in spite of the hazards.

The experts at the Stoddard Firm can help you piece together what happened to you or your loved one, how it should have been prevented, and exactly where the accident prevention process broke down. We’ll look beyond Gulfstream and the worker’s comp system to find the best source of compensation, so that you can recover from the accident as fully as possible. If you’d like to discuss your situation and learn more about your options, feel free to reach out by phone or chat.