Airplane Accident

What are the most common causes of helicopter crashes?

A horrific Texas helicopter accident recently claimed the lives of two newlyweds.  Will Byler and his wife Bailee had been wed for an hour and a half when they set off on a family owned helicopter piloted by Gerald Lawrence.  The helicopter containing the newlyweds crashed for unknown reasons in Uvalde, Texas, 85 miles west of San Antonio.  According to the National Transportation Safety Board, skies were clear on the day of the accident.  The preliminary NTSB report reveals that the Bell 206B helicopter crashed on dangerous, rocky terrain which complicated investigations.  So far, the cause of the tragic crash that claimed the lives of two newlyweds too soon is still unknown.

What are the top causes of plane crashes?

Perhaps nothing is so terrifying as the thought of a plane crash.  Fortunately, commercial airplane accidents are quite rare.  Overall, per the National Transportation Safety Board, your odds of dying in a plane crash are one in 11 million.  Nonetheless, plane accidents can and do occur, especially when smaller aircrafts are involved.  Just this year, a woman died on a Southwest flight after the window shattered during flight.  Several people additionally died in private plane accidents, including a Hamptons crash in which the wing of the plane broke off mid-flight, killing three.  Our Austin airplane accident attorneys discuss the incidences and causes of plane accidents below.

Air travel is much safer than traveling by car, but sometimes planes crash. When they do, everyone wants to know who is responsible. We need to determine who was at fault to evaluate who might owe you compensation if you or a loved one has the misfortune to be a victim of an airplane accident.

Many things can cause an airplane to crash, including:

Intentional acts, like the United Airlines Flight 175 that crashed into the World Trade Center South Tower on September 11, 2001, or a bomb going off in the cargo hold during the flight, as happened on Air India Flight 182 over Ireland in 1985. All 329 people on board the Air India flight died. Nearly 3,000 people died, and more than 6,000 sustained injuries in the September 11 attacks.

Sometimes planes crash because of an intentional act from someone on the ground, like the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 that someone involved in the Russian invasion of Ukraine shot down (reportedly with a surface-to-air missile) in 2014 near the border of Ukraine and Russian. All 298 passengers and crew-members died.

If you have been on any plane, you likely heard the warning that you should take care to open the overhead bins as items may have shifted during flight. Although you may have listened to the advice, you might not have taken it seriously or gave little thought to quickly opening the bin to retrieve your baggage.

However, flight attendants give that warning for a reason—baggage really does shift during your trip, and it can cause harm if it flies out of the bin at you.

A recent article on Quartz examines the most two recent incidents on Southwest flights involving windows. On April 17, 2018,

What are the Most Common Aviation Accidents?

Many people have a fear of flying. Generally speaking, that fear is unfounded. You are more likely to die in a car crash than a plane crash. In fact, you are 73 times more likely to die in a car than a plane. That doesn’t negate the fact that some people do die or get injured every year in place crashes.
Read more . . .

Flying an airplane is a marvel of modern technology, using thousands of intricate and complicated machines to hold many tons of people and equipment in the air.  So when planes crash, the reasons tend to be equally complicated.  For that reason, many states have chosen to write special laws that apply to liability for damages caused by an airplane accident.  

Texas, however, applies the same law to plane crashes as it applies to any other sort of claim for damages based on negligence, an approach that was affirmed by the United States Supreme Court in 1983 (see Brooks v.