Aviation cases rarely rest on a single liability theory, because a single accident typically implicates several potential causes at once — crew decision-making, maintenance and inspection practices, air traffic guidance, and the design or manufacture of the aircraft or its components. Common carriers are generally held to a heightened duty of care toward passengers, shaping the negligence analysis against the airline or operator, while a separate products liability track runs against the manufacturer of the airframe, engine, or a specific component if a design, manufacturing, or warning defect contributed to the event. For international carriage, the Montreal Convention displaces most other causes of action and substitutes its own liability structure once a flight qualifies as international carriage and an 'accident' causing injury occurs onboard or during boarding and disembarking.

The National Transportation Safety Board investigates most significant aviation accidents independently of any lawsuit, and while its final report and probable-cause determination are typically inadmissible as direct evidence at trial, the investigation still shapes the litigation — factual findings, wreckage analysis, and interviews gathered during the NTSB process become a roadmap both sides mine for admissible evidence through their own experts and discovery. Because a single incident can generate claims from many passengers or survivors at once, aviation litigation frequently consolidates into coordinated proceedings, and the interplay of aircraft hull, product liability, and aviation liability coverage across multiple defendants adds another layer of negotiation on top of the underlying causation dispute.

Causation apportionment is the fulcrum of most multi-defendant aviation cases: crew, maintenance provider, and manufacturer each have an incentive to point at the other two, and the NTSB's factual findings (even though not directly admissible for their probable-cause conclusion) become the shared evidentiary battleground each side's experts use to build a competing causal narrative. The layered insurance structure across hull, product liability, and aviation liability coverage means the parties with the deepest exposure are not always the ones controlling the litigation, and consolidation of many claims after a single mass-casualty event pushes toward negotiated global resolutions that account for the full population of claimants rather than any one plaintiff's case in isolation.