Much of aircraft design is performed for the purpose of making aircraft less likely to fail. The reason why is obvious: an airplane crash is a dramatic and horrifying way to die, with long minutes of knowing that the end is coming before the final fireball — and it doesn't help that dozens or even hundreds of lives are lost all at once when an airplane falls.
Having a small aircraft certainly reduces the number of casualties, but dramatically increases the chances of a crash, for a variety of reasons. Not only are smaller crafts more fragile, but pilots flying solo or with small, personal groups are more likely to nod off, get in an argument, or have some other incident take their mind off of the flight. Finally, smaller planes aren't equipped with the massively power autopilots that grace commercial planes.
All this means there are a surprising number of small plane crashes. Lawyers in Winter Gardens, when asked what the legal issues surrounding small plane crashes were, had a lot to say:
- Were Actual Damages Incurred? — This seems like an obvious question: if nothing else, someone's airplane was ruined! But there are some interesting technicalities that can make this question harder to answer than it first seems.
- Who Is At Fault? — Assuming damaged were incurred, the obvious question is always who is at fault for the crash, and there's a long list of potentially-culpable parties. The pilot and copilot are obvious ones, but the fault can also lie with air-traffic controllers, maintenance people at the airfield, or even the manufacturers of a part that malfunctioned in mid-flight.
- Can You Prove It? — Even if someone was clearly at fault for the plane crash, the question of proof remains. Because the kind of case these Winter Gardens personal injury attorneys pursue are civil cases rather than criminal ones, the proof doesn't need to be "beyond a shadow of a doubt" — it's merely whether or not the "preponderance of the evidence" points at the guilty party. It's still not easy to prove, but it's much more likely to get a victory in a civil case than you would in a criminal case against the same defendant.