Originally Posted by
JamesNoBrakes
This is not a new thing and not brought about by the pilots bill of rights. The appeal to the US court of appeals is written in the order and has been for years (not one of the recent changes), so be default, it has nothing to do with the PBR. The reason you may have referenced the PBR is that it's IN the PBR bill from congress, but it was even in the old FAA Order from 1997, it's been there all along, so nothing new. If a lawyer didn't know this existed, they are being paid too much
This does not exist because the NTSB has ruled in favor of the FAA, rather,
the NTSB has "torn the FAA a new one" on many occasions in court, making them drop the entire case on technicalities and little things when the FAA was convinced their case was "solid".
Two of our new hires are former ASIs (one from the ATL FSDO and the other formerly of the OKC FSDO and most recently the Academy - the one I told you about).
We have been talking a lot about enforcement actions and one of the things they have shared is how often something actually gets taken to court. They have some amazing stories of having a guy 'dead to rights' and the lawyers will tell them to drop it because they don't have enough. Seems that the burden of proof they have applied is pretty high for Admin Law and they seem like some of the DAs around the state that don't like to take something to court unless they feel like they have a 99.99% of winning. I'm astounded at what some people are getting away with - and I'm not talking about altitude deviations mind you but rather unsafe operations and stuff like operating without proper training or certificates!
On another forum there is a discussion about whether a local pilot whom the poster knows should be turned in to the FSDO for operating as a Commercial/Multi-instrument rated pilot when he is really only a ASEL Private Pilot actively flying passengers around to include IMC operations. This would seem to be a slam-dunk case - but the one story related is nearly this bad and the lawyers took a pass on it
