First Jury Verdict Applying the Crashworthiness Doctrine to Aircraft: Smith v. Cessna (1973)
Won by Turley Law Firm.
Windle Turley obtained what legal scholars credit as the first jury verdict applying the crashworthiness doctrine to an aircraft, holding Cessna liable for a fuel-system design that allowed occupants, including children, to burn to death in a post-crash fire following a Texas runway departure.
What happened
On a Texas airfield sometime before 1973, James Smith and David French were aboard a single-engine Cessna with two young sons. During takeoff, the plane left the end of the runway, rolled down a slope, and struck a barbed-wire fence at low speed. The impact itself was survivable, but it ruptured the fuel system and fuel poured into the cabin, setting off a fire that killed several occupants, including the children. Smith survived.
In the years that followed, Windle Turley filed suit against Cessna Aircraft Company on behalf of the families. The central claim was not that Cessna caused the runway departure but that the plane's design failed to protect the occupants once a crash became unavoidable. That theory, called crashworthiness or the 'second collision' doctrine, had been applied to automobiles since the late 1960s following Larsen v. General Motors Corp. No court had applied it to aircraft.
The crashworthiness theory asks whether a manufacturer reasonably anticipated that its product would be involved in accidents, and whether the design could have done more to limit injuries in the crash sequence. Applied to aviation, it meant examining whether Cessna had adequately designed the fuel system, cabin structure, and other components to reduce the risk of post-impact fire and fatal burn injuries.
On January 15, 1973, the Texas district court returned a verdict for the plaintiffs. The decision in No. 70-9255-L was unpublished, but its significance was immediate and lasting. Law review commentary in the William and Mary Law Review and the SMU Journal of Air Law and Commerce both cited it as the first judicial application of the crashworthiness doctrine to an airplane crash.
The verdict put general aviation manufacturers on notice that their design obligations extended beyond preventing accidents. A plane that survived a survivable crash but then killed its occupants through fire could give rise to products liability. Scholarly articles published through the late 1970s and 1980s treated Smith v. Cessna as the opening case in a line of aviation crashworthiness litigation that would reshape how manufacturers approached cabin and fuel-system design.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Turley Law Firm
All Turley Law Firm proven verdicts →A Dallas jury returned a $119.6 million verdict against the Catholic Diocese of Dallas after finding it grossly negligent and fraudulent in concealing years of sexual abuse by priest Rudy Kos; eight of the eleven plaintiffs, represented by Windle Turley, later settled for $23.4 million.
A Dallas County jury awarded $17.5 million to David Fitzgerald, a former maintenance worker who lost both arms and both legs after his infectious disease physician administered eight ineffective antibiotics while never prescribing the one drug that would have stopped his MRSA infection.
Windle Turley filed a $400 million federal lawsuit in Dallas on behalf of former Hare Krishna boarding-school students who suffered rape, physical torture, and emotional abuse as children; the litigation resolved in 2005 through a California bankruptcy court settlement paying $9.5 million to hundreds of victims.
A 20-year-old passenger in a 2014 Honda CR-V suffered a crushed skull and permanent brain, face and left-eye injuries when a red-light runner struck the car and her brother's head hit hers. An Eastern District of Texas jury found the CR-V's restraint design defective and awarded her $21,180,808.74, with Honda 23 percent responsible. The judgment of $4,871,586.01 stood and the Fifth Circuit affirmed.
Related product liability verdicts
Sullivan Papain was among the firms representing New York State against Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, Brown & Williamson, and Lorillard, securing a $25 billion recovery through the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement.
C. Steven Yerrid, the youngest of Florida's 11-lawyer 'Dream Team,' added racketeering and conspiracy charges that tripled the damages ceiling, helping the state secure what was then the largest civil settlement in American history against the tobacco industry.
As co-lead counsel in the federal Roundup multidistrict litigation and the first firm to sue Monsanto in 2015, Weitz and Luxenberg helped negotiate a $10.9 billion settlement resolving approximately 125,000 non-Hodgkin lymphoma claims against Bayer-owned Monsanto.
After fifteen years of litigation and three failed bankruptcy maneuvers by Johnson and Johnson subsidiaries, Ashcraft and Gerel attorneys R. Bryant McCulley and Michelle Parfitt helped negotiate a global, uncapped settlement of at least $5.5 billion covering approximately 76,000 ovarian-cancer claims.