Clay,
I certainly wouldn't argue your point. My point was that the lawyers are the middle men and women. It still takes a greedy litigant to engage the lawyer. Granted there are ambulance chasers out there, and those are the absolute pit of their profession, but it still takes two to tango.
Cessna's CEO was asked, when they were going back into production on single engine airplanes if they'd get back into the 180/185 market. His response was that there was no way they'd EVER get back into tailwheel production, largely due to that suit.
Nimpo,
The suit involved a fellow who owned a SC, and towed gliders with it, from a private airstrip. The strip was half on his property, and half on his neighbor's if I remember correctly. No commercial operations were permitted off the strip.
The guy with the SC was going to tow a glider, and wanted a video, so he placed a video camera in the front seat, facing aft. Video the back seat pilot, and the glider through the skylight on tow. In the meantime, his neighbor, who had repeatedly complained about the commercial glider tow op, drove a van onto the mid point of the strip, on HIS property, blocking the strip. The glider tug pilot apparently assumed he could get airborne before getting to the van. He admitted in testimony that he knew the van was there.
On takeoff, he hit the van, and in the ensuing accident, he was severely injured, which resulted in him becoming paraplegic.
He sued Piper (and his neighbor), arguing two points: one was that the airplane was not equipped with a shoulder harness in the rear seat by Piper, making it dangerous.... The second point was that the Super Cub was an "inherently dangerous" design, in that the tailwheel design precluded good visibility from the pilot seat, as I recall.
Anyway, the jury found in favor of the plaintiff on both counts, and essentially set the precedent that a tailwheel airplane is an inherently dangerous design (or words to that effect) due to it's lack of visibility out the front.
Piper did not aggressively defend that case until the jury found in favor of the plaintiff, at which point, Piper appealed. On appeal, however, it's mostly procedures that are reviewed, not facts. In this case, the appeal went nowhere.
I suspect that had Piper aggressively gone after that case from the beginning, they could POSSIBLY have convinced the jury that the plaintiff was a totally irresponsible loon, and they would have won the case.
This is all from memory, and some of the above may be in error. Someone can provide a link to the case I'm sure. This is the essence of the case, though.
MTV
