In this contribution we investigate the problem of simultaneous observer based sensor fault reconstruction and state estimation of a class of linear time-varying (LTV) systems that are skew-symmetric models. The main features concern the use of a bank of observers to detect and isolate faulty sensors and in the same time provide unbiased state estimation. On the other hand, we introduced a switching gain technique to deal with singular points. Stability analysis is achieved thanks to the Barbalat's lemma and without solving the well-known time-varying Sylvester equation. The proposed approach is extended to more general LTV systems of any order. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.