In 1782, the Montgolfier Brothers, professionally engaged in the manufacture of paper bags , produced the first machine to accomplish flight per se. Their first practice was to fill paper bags with hot air, which ascended by the thermodynamic force produced. Following their original discovery, they made larger and larger bags until they eventually evolved a great balloon which was capable of carrying a man into the air. Development was so rapid that within ten years from the first successful man-carrying ascent, balloons were successfully employed in warfare by the French, against the Austrians in 1794 at Maubeuge, in the battle of Fleures.

This is an examination of various aspects of the problem of crimes aboard aircraft, which is receiving attention from individual jurists and from international organizations today.

For the purpose of this address I would like to divide aviation into three broad divisions. First, Service aviation, and I do not think I need define it any more closely than that; secondly, scheduled airline operation which can include some of the long distance passenger charter work, and in the third division, the rest, which is in fact largely made up of aviation in the outback of the great countries of the world. I do not propose to make any further reference to Service aviation, or civil airline operation, or to the development of aircraft for their use because a great many people, far more qualified than I am, have covered those subjects in very great detail.

L’avion permet à l’homme de réaliser l'un de ses plus chers désiras celui de voler. Par ailleurs l'aviation transforme la vie de l’homme par son influence sur les civilisations désormais mises brutalement en contact les unes avec les autres, pas son influence économique et par son rôle militaire.

The global limitation of the shipowner's liability has been called the 'clé de voûte', the 'keystone', of maritime law. International air law does not have a global limitation of liability, and if one had to characterize the importance of limitation of liability in the field of aviation it would be more appropriate to compare it with the 'leitmotiv' of some unfinished symphony. It certainly is not the only theme, but it is one that comes back every now and then and which makes international private air law, as it has developed in the last 25 years, unthinkable without a limitation of the carrier's or operator's liability.

The purpose of this study is to examine in detail certain international conventions in the field or air law with a view to determining under what conditions international air carriers are responsible for the acts of agents and servants. The agreements considered are the Warsaw Convention (12 Oct. 1929), the revision of the Warsaw Convention proposed at Rio de Janeiro (Sept. 1953), the second Rome Convention (1 Oct. 1952), and the Draft Convention on Aerial Collisions (12-22 Jan. 1954, Paris). Other treaties will be treated incidentally.

The subject of this paper has been much discussed. For even before the Wright Brothers had successfully test-flown their aeroplane, Fauchille in 1902, had already drafted his “Legal Regime of the Aerostats". In that paper provisions were made regarding crimes and birth of a child in a balloon. From that time on up to the present, the subject has been pursued intermittently by international law associations and by well-known publicists. Various conferences or congresses had discussed the subject, but nothing beyond the proposal stage was done.

Two States, namely the United States and Canada, have seen fit, in recent years, to formulate rules, for security purposes, in respect of identification and control of aircraft approaching their coasts, or within certain fixed zones contiguous to the coast, whereby, in effect, they assert a jurisdiction for that limited purpose only, which departs drastically from the popular conception in Maritime Law of the three-mile limit, six-mile limit, or twelve-mile limit, which has heretofore been generally accepted, among laymen particularly, and by governments, and indeed, by some international lawyers, as the limit to which a State may exercise jurisdiction over the high seas contiguous to its coasts, for various purposes. [...]

Un abordage aérien est le creuset où viennent se fondre tous les problèmes de la responsabilité aérienne: en effet, un abordage dans les airs donne très souvent naissance à une série d'obligations entre exploitants, passagers, chargeurs, tiers à la surface et cet ensemble d'obligations n'a pas encore été réglementé du point de vue international; les législations nationales ont partiellement résolu ces problèmes, à la lumière du droit commun, du droit terrestre et maritime et bien rarement en vertu de dispositions spéciales de "lois aériennes". [...]

A B.B.C. musical critic, reviewing an interpretation of an Elgar symphony, stated that "with Elgar, one travelled". He was pleasantly rebuked by a colleague who reminded him that people nowadays did not want to travel; they wanted simply to "get there". Fifty three years after the Wright Brothers demonstrated at Kitty Hawk that it was possible to fly heavier-than-air machines, the jet age is making its full impact upon us. Plans are vigorously afoot to transport the travelling public from one side of the Atlantic to the other in super swift aircraft, capable of carrying 100/120 passengers, at the approximate cost of $375 return fare.