Orville Wright is reported to have once quipped, “The airplane stays up because it doesn’t have the time to fall.” 

Unfortunately, the father of modern aviation wasn’t completely right about this natural phenomenon—sometimes planes do have time to fall, and especially small ones. The jurisprudence of aviation contains a plethora of cases dealing with the difficult issues of liability resulting from flying small aircraft. The Law and Liability of Small Aircraft contains a compelling representation of judicial decisions—divided between product liability lawsuits and those that deal with the regulatory scheme that oversees aviation—that present the typical dilemmas of the courts in this area of law.

In the end, these opinions invariably portray the dramatic courtroom struggles resulting from the tense circumstances that often lead to the tragic loss of human life in this most alluring of human endeavors.