Galaxy Airlines Flight 203: Court-Appointed Role for Minnesota Families After 70-Death Reno Crash

On the night of January 21, 1985, Galaxy Airlines Flight 203 lifted off from Reno-Tahoe International Airport bound for Minneapolis and crashed within seconds. The aircraft, a Lockheed L-188A Electra, stalled and went down just past the end of the runway. Seventy of the 71 people aboard died, including 65 passengers who were mostly Minnesotans returning home after a casino trip to watch Super Bowl XIX.

The National Transportation Safety Board determined that the captain failed to control the flight path and airspeed after ground crew had left an air starter access door open, causing vibrations during the takeoff roll. Instead of investigating the source of the vibration, the pilots reduced engine power, triggering an aerodynamic stall from which the aircraft could not recover. The NTSB cited crew error and deficient cockpit resource management as the primary causes.

Because the passenger list was drawn heavily from the Minneapolis-Saint Paul metro area, the bulk of the wrongful death actions filed in the weeks that followed landed in Minnesota courts. The volume of related claims prompted consolidation for discovery purposes on May 7, 1985. On July 15, 1985, the Hennepin County District Court issued Practice and Procedure Order No. 1 forming a Plaintiffs' Liability Committee to conduct all liability discovery on behalf of the plaintiffs collectively, so that defendants faced a single coordinated effort rather than dozens of duplicative proceedings.

James Schwebel of Schwebel, Goetz, Sieben and Hanson, P.A. served as counsel to that court-appointed committee. The committee's work covered the full range of liability questions: pilot conduct, airline maintenance practices, ground-crew procedures, and FAA oversight. Each plaintiff who reached an individual settlement with Galaxy Airlines or related defendants was required under the court's pretrial order to deposit an amount not to exceed five percent of the recovery, deducted from the plaintiff's attorneys' fees, into a committee escrow account to fund the committee's fees and expenses.

The Minnesota Court of Appeals addressed a dispute arising from this structure in 1986, when co-trustees for one family that had settled sought to avoid the five-percent obligation. The court upheld the pretrial order, reasoning that plaintiffs who benefited from the committee's liability work owed a contribution toward it regardless of when or how they resolved their individual claims. By that point, multiple Minnesota families had already reached individual settlements subject to the escrow.

The crash accelerated FAA action: the agency required mandatory modifications to air starter access doors on all operating Lockheed Electras, and Galaxy Airlines ceased operations entirely in 1986 after military contract terminations and FAA grounding actions.