Our club switched to AOPAIA a few years ago after Avemco tried to jump our premium by $5k...with no claims or other changes. Their excuse was that our membership numbers went up and the change was triggered due to the matrix that they use for clubs, which also wasn't true. So, we shopped to AOPIA, the came in lower than what we had been paying with Avemco for the same coverage. We gave Avemco the chance to keep our business. They weren't interested. So we bailed. Now I am harassed all the time asking us to come back. Seems they would have been wiser to just try that hard to retain us in the first place.

For my new personal plane I used them as well and got a good rate I think.

GSP

Oh yeah, customer service is much better too.

Sorry about any personal sentiment that reflects on lawyers....

No offense taken.

The real point is that insurance is not a gimme--it's a contract between the insured and the company. If the policy says, in effect, "this incident is covered", then they pay. If not, then no coverage. The reason that there are cases involving insurance companies is not that they are necessarily trying to avoid paying when they should, but because the language of the policy is often nebulous enough that different people interpret it in different ways.

For instance, in this particular case, the family (or at least their attorneys) believed that since what the pilot charged didn't cover his expenses, it wasn't commercially reasonable, and therefore couldn't be a commercial operation. Avemco's position was that it was a commercial operation, because there was a charge, and the policy specifically allowed sharing of expenses by people with a common purpose (much like the FAA allows sharing of expenses), but paying a fixed fee to go for rides didn't qualify. The trial judge agreed with Avemco and granted summary judgment (so there wasn't a trial); the appellate court agreed with the trial judge, and provided a very good analysis of their reasoning. They analyzed the language of other cases, where the "shared expenses" language wasn't there but commercial operations were similarly prohibited. It's really a pretty well-written opinion.

The bottom line is make sure that your own policy covers what you plan to do. For instance, I do Angel Flights now and then. There is no compensation at all--no one pays for any of my operation of the aircraft. Clearly I'm covered, so long as I'm otherwise covered (like current BFR, current for the operations, adherence to regs, etc.). Others do Young Eagles, etc., for no charge. But as soon as the pilot accepts any compensation, at all, the specter of non-coverage pops up. So check it out--it doesn't take much effort, and obviously the benefits are great.

Cary

"For my new personal plane I used them as well and got a good rate I think." Tell us about your new personal plane did i miss something?

Since this thread has devolved into "legal speak" as it applies to AC insurance, I will reply. Your points are all technically correct. Summary judgment was granted. And, as you pointed out to us lay people, no jury trial. Now, we tend to think of jury trials as required mostly if one is charged with a serious crime. In civil suits, I think it is also reasonable to be granted consideration by normal everyday folks. If a guy has paid his premiums for years, thinks he is doing the right thing and then volunteers for a charity event... he should be covered. AND, I suspect the jury would agree. The small amount tendered by the ride recipient could and should be seen as cost sharing. Because even a non-aircraft owner would understand the economics of purchase, maintenance to a much higher standard than cars, training costs and worth of time spent. In granting summary judgment, no one but the judge (just a government salaried attorney) gets to define what is cost sharing. The appeals court (more lawyers) just passes it over and agrees with the lower court judge. The other odd behavior is to always look at precedent. This has always baffled me. It is the grandest form of passing the buck. If a previous court rendered an opinion... it is looked at as the gold standard of right and wrong. So any bad decisions get passed along through legal history right along with the good ones. And any judge is welcome to drag out his dusty books and say, "see, this guy said it was so... and now I am going to also." It is then accepted as valid and without question.I know I am treading on dangerous ground here, to take up argument with a lawyer, but most of us here on this site are just ordinary folks; out taking risks and hoping for things to turn out OK.

When I bought 62L, a wise fellow at the airport told me he had a business card "somewhere" for a guy that could save me some $$ on insurance if I would call him.

Yeah Yeah I'll just call AOPA...they're looking out for me and my $$$. They were highish and so was Avemco and Falcon on identical coverage. I asked him to go find his card and let me know for one last quote. Chris saved me a few hundred + over all of the others.

Chris Travers
http://www.traversaviation.com

Try them out-

I don't look at this as any kind of argument, just some discussion and an opportunity to clarify some bits and pieces of our legal system.

The whole idea of summary judgment is that if the facts and the law favor one side, then that side wins, and a jury never hears the case, at all. If the Judge decides, however, that there are some material facts which are unclear, then he/she would deny the Motion For Summary Judgment and there would be a trial--not necessarily a jury trial, unless one side or the other had requested a jury trial at the time they submitted their original pleadings. And there are many cases in which a jury isn't appropriate.

We have fewer and fewer jury trials these days, because they are expensive, and statistically they don't accomplish much different from a "bench trial", judge alone. We hardly ever use a jury when it's contractual interpretations involved, because most often those are decided by the judge "as a matter of law". The Avemco vs. Auburn case would never have been submitted to a jury, because it was filed as a request for a declaratory judgment, for the judge to determine the meaning and intent of the insurance contract. It was not the case of the surviving family members suing the pilot's estate. That may have happened, and probably did, but that's not the issue in this particular case.

The issue of "cost sharing" would have been easier, if the pilot had followed more or less the FAA's definitions, and calculated the cost of the fuel, oil, etc. and divided it by the number of seats in the airplane, and charged that amount. In fact, based on the language of the policy he had, that might well have resolved it in the favor of coverage. But that's not what he did--the amount he charged bore no relationship to the operational expenses.

So then someone will ask, why did his wife lose everything? I don't have that answer, because I don't know how his estate was planned. It shouldn't have happened that way, if everything they owned was in joint ownership. But maybe he was of the old school thinking that everything was in his name, believing that that was OK, since she'd get everything on his death--but the accident intervened, and her entitlement to his estate was only to what was left after a judgment against his estate was paid. There could be other reasons--without the facts and the circumstances, I just don't know.

The lesson, though, is pretty clear. If you want commercial coverage, buy commercial coverage. If you don't want commercial coverage, then don't do any flying that smacks of commercial flying. And if you're not sure, find out.

Cary

Glidergeek wrote:"For my new personal plane I used them as well and got a good rate I think." Tell us about your new personal plane did i miss something?

Yup!

http://www.backcountrypilot.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=11663