According to the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, there are approximately 87,000 flights in domestic skies at any single time, a third of which are commercial carriers. Our daily lives are dependent on air travel. Whether for work, family or other personal reasons, not a day passes when many of us or our loved ones embark on a flight. Although mass commercial disasters do not occur often, which illustrates the attempts to keep safety built into our national aviation infrastructure, when accidents do happen, the tragedy is impressed upon the national consciousness. And, many times, the accidents were avoidable. Structural defects, pilots’ errors, maintenance deficiencies, design defects, air traffic safety controller decisions and many other factors can contribute to why a plane crashes.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is the government agency responsible for investigating a crash and determining the cause of an airplane crash. Among the factors attributed by the NTSB for initiating the sequence of occurrences leading to either a minor accident or serious plane crash are pilot error and aircraft malfunction. Even if weather conditions, such as turbulence or ice build up during the cruise or descent phase of the flight, are a factor in a plane going down, these weather conditions generally are foreseeable and the handling of the aircraft in these conditions is part of a pilot’s training.

Isolating the cause or causes of a crash is an immensely difficult job; however, there is an answer to that question in nearly every case. In the crash of AlaskaAir Flight 261, the cause was determined to be a single jackscrew. The information was discovered after years of intensive examination and research by the NTSB as well as the independent work of Clifford Law Offices whose legal team took nearly 100 depositions in the case. In another tragic plane crash case, American Eagle Flight 4184 went into an ‘uncommanded roll’ as a result of ice buildup that was allowed to accumulate due to the faulty design of a pneumatic boot in the wings. Ice buildup would have been less of an issue, were it not for the faulty design of the de-icing boot. To arrive at this causal determination, Clifford Law Offices utilized its extensive network of aviation experts to provide evidence of faulty design. Moreover, Clifford Law Offices dispatched its experienced aviation accident attorneys to take depositions of foreign corporate and governmental employees in countries including France and Sweden.

Aviation cases are among the most time- and resource-intensive within civil litigation. The resulting wreckage of a mass commercial airplane impact will usually obscure the cause of the plane crash. By its nature, the litigation associated with these airplane accidents requires meticulous investigation and interrogation of all the elements that could possibly provide insight into what went wrong. These elements include the scene, witnesses, airplane manufacturers, designers, parts suppliers, maintenance records and crews, and industry experts. Consequently, an undertaking of this scale is possible only if handled by an experienced aviation law firm with extensive resources which can be marshaled in the effort to represent its clients.

Clifford Law Offices has a great deal of experience in litigating commercial airline crashes. For more information on some of our aviation cases, please visit our Record of Justice.

The list below shows a sampling of our commercial aviation litigation.