Originally Posted by JamesNoBrakes

Who, the NTSB judge? What are you talking about? Do you even know? FAA lawyers are the ones that bring proposed fines/penalties against pilots for violations, although far less with compliance philosophy these days than in past years. As with anyone that deals with the law/court, they don't want to send out notices of proposed action unless they have a case they think they can win in court, and like most lawyers, they really do not want to go to court in the first place. They will turn down cases if they don't think they can win. There are many situations where we (as the FAA) are pretty sure something happened contrary to regulations, but unless the evidence exists, it dies and goes away because there's nowhere it can go if it's not supported by evidence. It's nothing anyone I work with gets all bent out of shape about. Have there been a few bad apples? I'm sure there have and I would encourage anyone to report them, because it makes it harder for us to do our job in the end if someone is trying to screw someone over for no reason or is not acting like a professional. The job is to protect the flying public and take appropriate action if the public is endangered or the pilot is a danger to themselves. I think we've done a little better job of that in the last couple (2) years, extending the compliance philosophy and "fix it" non-punitive safety-culture for inadvertent mistakes.