Air travel has become much safer in the century since that first historic flight back in 1903. Despite all the advancements in safety and technology, airplane accidents do still happen. Luckily, they are not always catastrophic and fatal accidents. It is rare to hear of an airplane accident wherein all the passengers perish. More common are the accidents on the runway, on take off or landing or the smaller private aircraft accidents where there are survivors. If you have been involved in an airplane accident and suffered injuries as a result you may be asking the important, but complicated, question of “who is responsible for my injuries?”
According to California airplane accident lawyer Emery Ledger of Ledger & Associates, the question of negligence (a legal term for fault) in airplane accident cases can be even harder to answer than other types of accidents. In the State of California, airplane accidents are governed by the laws of negligence. California, along with most other states, uses a form of comparative negligence to determine fault in accident cases. What this means is that more than one person – or entity – can share the fault for a single accident. An easy example of how comparative negligence is applied is in an automobile accident. Imagine that driver number one was speeding and collided with driver number two who ran through a red light. The first driver may have made the accident worse because they were speeding and therefore shares some percentage of the fault. The important question under comparative negligence is whether you have of the fault than the other parties. In an airplane accident case, if you were a passenger, then it is likely that you were not responsible for any of the fault. So who was responsible?
An airplane accident may takes weeks or months to investigate before any conclusions regarding fault can be made. Statistics tell us the more than half of all airplane accidents are caused in part or in whole by pilot error or mechanical failure. It is possible that the pilot may share some of the responsibility. If your pilot was flying for a company, they may also share the fault for not providing required training or a variety of other reasons. If the plane suffered a mechanical failure, the manufacturer could share some of the blame or that could also be the result of the company not performing proper maintenance. If there was bad weather at the time of the accident, whose decision was it to continue the flight? Again, the pilot or the company may have been negligent in allowing the flight to continue. Did the airplane crash into another plane on the runway? If so, was the pilot of the other plane to blame or the air traffic controller that was directing the planes?
As you can see, there are a variety of parties in an airplane accident case that could be responsible. It may be that one of them alone was responsible or they may all share the responsibility. An experienced airplane accident lawyer can help you sift through all the evidence and determine who was responsible and to what extent. Whether it was one party or several, the bottom line is that you may be entitled to compensation for any injuries that you suffered as a result of the accident. Contact California airplane accident lawyer Emery Ledger to start the process of determining who was negligent and who must compensate you for your injuries. Lawyer Ledger can be reached at 1-800-300-0001 or online at www.ledgerlaw.com.
