The Cirrus is a state-of-the-art, largely composite aircraft that’s very well built, strong, stable and maneuverable – hardly a tin can, though believe me, I’ve flown those – and has excellent visibility through its large windows. It’s also pretty slick – very clean aerodynamically, with very small drag coefficient for its planform. Properly flown, it’s no less safe than a car. The type has logged hundreds of thousands of hours of flight time since its commercial introduction over a decade ago. There’s nothing fundamentally “wrong” with its design. I’ve never owned one but I have a few hours in them as a renter and for “brushing up” on some skills grown rusticated with age. I can tell you that any pilot who was trying to perform a 180-degree turn inside the Hudson corridor, below the level of the surrounding buildings, was doing something very foolish unless there was some kind of genuine emergency at hand – like, collision avoidance – and any instructor who would permit him to do so should have had his license yanked.

By the way, the same is generally true of a Cub. It’s got its performance envelope and operated within that, it’s a very safe airplane too. Aside from the doped fabric it’s covered with, it has a very strong aluminum frame. And you can operate it at very low speeds, too. Tales abound of Cubs with headwinds being passed by traffic on the ground. I can run faster than its stall speed. And I’ve been mistaken for a musk ox at a distance.

But as a licensed multi-instrument private pilot with about 3000 flight hours under my belt who has seen the private aviation industry in this country virtually destroyed by the expenses of ridiculous lawsuits brought by incompetent pilots and their families, the scenario of an aircraft as relatively simple as a Cirrus going out of control due to a berserk Hall-9000 control system strikes me as too preposterous to take very seriously. This one has all the classic hallmarks of overreaching student pilot stupidity and an instructor who was asleep at the switch – a very, very common scenario that keen aviation lawyers like Arthur Allen Wolk and his ilk have parlayed into millions upon millions of undeserved settlements and jury awards.

Peaceably for the last 200+ years huh? The most wars of any country ever,and one of the youngest. With a civil war thrown in there to boot. Let’s not sugarcoat here.

And our judicial system is very flawed. Maybe less so than other countries, but it is still flawed. Dirty judges, planted evidence,Killers walk, innocents found guilty etc.. etc.. I could go on but won’t.

I’m not giving an opinion on this case here, maybe the controls were faulty. But you seem to have swallowed the hook line and sinker here. You are strongly implying everything is perfect with the system when it’s far from it. Most people feel the system is faulty because it is.

Neither you nor I know anything more than the barest facts of this case. Yet you (and the entirety of the internets, apparently) have no problem issuing not only a verdict in this complex products liability dispute but, further, you arrive at the conclusion that the legal system under which we’ve lived peaceably for 200+ years is somehow flawed for even allowing such disputes to be heard in a court of law.

It’s your constitutional right to spout an opinion about which you know nothing but God help you when you’re the one who’s hurt and no one will believe you.

Not saying that happened — I have no idea — but you can’t simply look at the crash and say “his fault.”