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Old 05-05-2021, 02:57 PM
  #76  
jaxsurf
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Joined APC: Jul 2018
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Originally Posted by JohnBurke View Post
Are you genuinely curious? You do seem to miss the point with some consistency. You quoted me discussing the temptation of the act for which Ms. Lunken is punished, and mocked that temptation. You quoted me mentioning that I've felt that temptation many times, and mocked my quote, suggesting that temptation means nothing. Okay, fine. Temptation means nothing without action, you say.

Because I speak for myself and not for you or anyone else, I use my own experiences and words, and as you mocked my words and suggested that "temptation" is meaningless or irrelevant, I also included my own experience, which is having done what Ms. Lunken did, thousands of times over the span of the last four decades. And no, it's not that big of a deal. Not once did the universe shudder from its foundation. Not once did scores of children follow the act and die in droves, and not once did the national airspace rend in two and fall tattered to the national floor in a puddle of collective tears. In fact, nothing happened.

Now, should the uninitiated be diving under powerlines and bridges and other obstacles, without reason and without cause, and without adequate training and experience? No. Hence the regulation. There is a big difference between flying under a bridge with several hundred feet vertically and laterally, and passing under a lower, tighter object.

You may not feel any sympathy for Ms. Lunken. You're under no obligation to do so. We might postulate all day long about comparisons, but the fact is that her actions did not rise to the level of revocation of all her certification. Were you to bust an altitude or land on a taxiway or have a runway incursion, to revoke your certificates would be extreme overkill; a suspension would be in order, and you'd almost certainly have prevented that by availing yourself of ASRS, ASAP, etc. If you were to lose everything you ever worked for and all your certification, others might say you brought it on yourself, because you may have violated the regulation....but the fact is that you wouldn't have invited more on yourself than perhaps administrative action. The nuclear option, revocation, not so much.

No, Ms. Lunken did not bring revocation on herself. Certainly she brought a potential investigation on herself, but this is not what happened. Well past the stale complaint rule, she received a revocation long after the fact. Not a letter of investigation. Not a legal exchange; this was a hooveresque emergency action; a revocation with the implication that Ms Lunken is a public danger, and a danger to herself, which is pure bull****. She's a wealth of experience, and a little old lady who happens to have five + decades of experience (who should have known better), but who did nothing that rose to the level of revocation.

Over-reach would be an extreme understatement, here.
Yes, I was genuinely curious. You say that doing illegal things is no big deal. Fine, I disagree.

I still think that telling the FAA you shouldn't be punished when caught doing illegal things because those things were really tempting to do and you're a weak person who can't resist temptation is stupid, so we definitely disagree there.

As to the rest, I do agree with you.
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