First Jury Verdict Applying the Crashworthiness Doctrine to Aircraft: Smith v. Cessna (1973)

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 The decision in No. 70-9255-L was unpublished, but its significance was immediate and lasting.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.