A new book by adopted alumnus and attorney Richard Schaden combines three of his passions: engineering, law, and aviation. Unsafe at Any Altitude, published in August 2021, takes readers through Schaden’s engineering and legal career in his decades-long effort to force the aviation industry to make air travel safer.
The book details Schaden’s early days as a young engineer at Boeing and his “training by fire” as a novice attorney representing criminal defendants in the 1967 Detroit riots—before he even had a chance to take the bar exam—and through his career representing air crash victims and their families, the book’s description notes.
Schaden, who has over 50 years of litigation and trial experience, began his career as an aeronautical engineer, working as a flight test engineer for the Boeing Co. and a jet engine project engineer for Continental Aviation and Engineering Corp. His tenure at Boeing was cut short after he discovered that he could do some of his best aeronautical engineering and re-engineering, and make aviation safer, in the courtroom, rather than in commercial aviation R&D departments. With a career encompassing more than 400 aviation accident cases, Schaden has obtained hundreds of millions of dollars in courtroom verdicts and settlements.
Among his extensive philanthropic efforts, Schaden is a longtime supporter of experiential learning at Colorado Law. In 2008, he established the Schaden Program in Experiential Learning and created the Schaden Chair in Experiential Learning (currently held by Professor Deborah Cantrell). At the 2012 Law Alumni Awards Banquet, he was named Colorado Law's first official Adopted Alumnus. Since then, the award—given annually by the school's Law Alumni Board—has been known as the Richard Schaden Adopted Alumnus Award.