Unsafe at Any Altitude

Travel with Richard Francis Schaden on his crusade to make air travel safer. The journey will take you from his early days as a naïve young engineer at Boeing, to his training by fire as a novice attorney representing criminal defendants in the Detroit riots, before he even had a chance to take the bar exam, and through his decades long career representing air crash victims and their families.

Richard’s tenure at Boeing was short, after he discovered that economics and marketing played a greater role in airplane design than he could as an engineer for the company.

Richard describes how the fox often watches the hen house when it comes to aircraft certification and accident reports, with the airplane manufacturers and airlines playing an integral and conflicted role as the partner of the FAA and NTSB.

Richard would come to discover that he could do more effective aviation engineering in the courtroom, then he could do within the engineering departments of major aviation manufacturers.

This book takes you through Richard’s entertaining engineering and legal career in his decades long effort to force the aviation industry to make air travel safer.