General Aviation Revitalization Act (1994)

We can talk about that for half an hour. Congress passed a law in 1992 or so, called the General Aviation Revitalization Act, because all the Piper and Beechcraft and Cessna companies were going bankrupt with lawsuits whenever some guy fails to maintain his aircraft and ditches it and kills himself and his family. Some attorney comes in and sues them and they get tens of millions of dollars in front of juries, because no one wants to even think about falling from the sky. Krupp looked at this and said, we don't want this liability. We can't make enough money off the few things we're selling. So they gave one year's notice. They couldn't just cut them off because that would be restraint of trade. They gave them one year to find another supplier. They found a company down in Kentucky that had been manufacturing crankshafts for International Harvester engines — the big trucks going down the highway. Those guys were looking for business, and they said, sure, we'll forge your crankshafts. Problem was, they didn't have quite as good quality control, particularly since they were building a new plant. In the process of building the new plant they weren't paying too much attention to what was going on in the old plant. They produced about three thousand crankshafts for Teledyne Continental that Teledyne Continental had to do a recall on. They had about ten failures; only one or two killed somebody.