AUBURN – The city of Lewiston is seeking dismissal of civil claims stemming from a plane crash in which three Lewiston High School students died.

The Air Force Junior ROTC students – Nicholas Babcock, 17; Teisha Loesberg, 16; and Shannon Fortier, 15 – were killed in 2006 when the single-engine plane in which they were passengers crashed into Barker Mountain in Newry.

The city filed a motion in Androscoggin County Superior Court for summary judgment claiming it’s not liable because the plane and pilot were not school property and personnel.

A June hearing is set.

The city hired a Federal Aviation Administration-approved air service, Twin Cities Air Service LLC in Auburn, and its certified flight instructors to take the students on the flights, city attorney Ed Benjamin Jr. said in court papers.

Benjamin is expected to argue that the city has governmental immunity from such claims under the Maine Tort Claims Act. No exception to that law exists in the case because the plane did not belong to the city, Benjamin wrote in court papers.

In two filings, the parents of the three students lodged wrongful death lawsuits against the city of Lewiston, the school department and Twin Cities Air Service. The two cases have since been consolidated.

In March, a judge ordered two of the claims against Twin Cities Air dismissed after a lawyer for the service argued that signed waivers from two of the students – Babcock and Loesberg – released the company from liability.

Twin Cities has no pending motions, said Peter Garcia, the air service’s attorney.

In a sworn affidavit, Robert Meyer, senior aerospace science instructor at Lewiston High School, said the arrangement to have Twin Cities Air take his students on flights was made in 2005 when some of the cadets were supposed to fly to Owls Head. Meyer called the charter service manager at Twin Cities. There was no written contract between Twin Cities and the school, he said.

Meyer said he left it up to Twin Cities to decide which aircraft and flight instructors to use.

William “Charlie” Weir, the 24-year-old flight instructor who piloted the plane that crashed with the students aboard, had flown students to Owls Head in 2005.

None of the cadets who flew with him reported any inappropriate flying or expressed any fear or concern about anything they had experienced while flying with him, Meyer said in his affidavit.

The cadets who flew with Weir immediately before the flight that crashed “expressed no concern about anything that had occurred on the flight, nor the way Mr. Weir had piloted the aircraft,” Meyer said in his affidavit.

The cadets commented about experiencing “zero Gs” – a feeling of weightlessness experienced in free-falls – on the flight. But Meyer said that “does not mean the pilot had done anything unsafe or inappropriate.”

The cadets also said they had flown low over trees, Meyer said. “That statement also did not cause me any concern” because the area in Bethel where the flight took place is heavily forested, Meyer said.

Meyer, who was a career pilot in the U.S. Air Force, said inexperienced fliers might have difficulty estimating altitude.

After the second flight had crashed, Meyer said the students who flew earlier revealed that Weir had performed a stall-and-recovery maneuver. Although allowed under Air Force Junior ROTC rules, Meyer said he was never told that maneuver would be part of the flight.

He said he wasn’t given any information prior to the crashed flight that Weir had piloted the plane “in a way that was risky or dangerous.”

A federal report showed that there was no mechanical failure by the Cessna 172N that caused it to crash. The National Transportation Safety Board pointed to incidents, including the earlier cadet flight the day of the crash, when Weir apparently took chances.

Other cadets reported that Weir had been flying barefoot on the day of the crash.

The lawsuits claim cadets reported Weir had flown in an “unsafe and reckless” manner by flying barefoot, flying too low, performing a stall-and-dive maneuver and executing a “zero G” maneuver.

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