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Parties Involved:
Federal Aviation Administration
Respondent
Paul Lindsay
Petitioner
National Transportation Safety Board
Respondent

Document Text:

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United States Court of Appeals

FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT

Argued October 27, 1994 Decided February 24, 1995

No. 94-1166

PAUL LINDSAY,

PETITIONER

v.

NATIONAL TRANSPORTATION SAFETY BOARD;

FEDERAL AVIATION ADMINISTRATION,

RESPONDENTS

Petition for Review of an Order of the

National Transportation Safety Board

J. Scott Hamilton argued the cause and filed the briefs for petitioner.

Kathleen Ann Yodice, Attorney, Federal Aviation Administration, argued the cause for respondents.

With her on the brief was Harry S. Gold, Attorney, Federal Aviation Administration. Susan S.

Caron, Attorney, Federal Aviation Administration, entered an appearance.

Before: SENTELLE, RANDOLPH, and TATEL, Circuit Judges.

Opinion for the court filed by Circuit Judge RANDOLPH.

Opinion concurring in part and concurring in the judgment filed by Circuit Judge TATEL.

RANDOLPH, Circuit Judge: The most remarkable thing about this case is that petitioner thinks

he is fit to hold a pilot's certificate. The Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration

revoked his certificate, a decision the National Transportation Safety Board sustained. To

reconstruct the events precipitating this agency action, and to understand this petition for review of

the Board's decision, we must go to central Florida and the pre-dawn hours of Sunday, October 17,

1993.

Two men and two women are at the Shamrock Lounge in Leesburg, drinking heavily. Their

common interest is skydiving. Both men are also pilots. Neither woman is. One of the men, Phillip

Smith, owns an aging Cessna Model 182, a single engine four-seater aircraft. He keeps his plane at

the Leesburg Municipal Airport. Smith is with his girlfriend, Debra Hall, a bartender at the

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Shamrock. The other man, petitioner Paul Lindsay, holds an FAA airline transportation pilot

certificate and has logged 4500 hours of flying time. Lindsay is with his girlfriend, Sandra Sprincis,

a nurse who resides in a trailer in the nearby town of Umatilla. Lindsay lives with his mother some

10 miles away, but sometimes stays with Sprincis. They have driven to the bar together in Sprincis'

car.

It is 1:30 a.m., and the Shamrock Lounge is about to close for the evening. "It's a nice night

for a flight," the men observe. With that, their reckless, irresponsible plan is hatched. Lindsay wants

to pilot Smith's plane. He has flown it before. Smith decides to fly it himself. That detail settled, the

four men and women leave the bar and drive in Debra Hall's car to Leesburg Airport, 3 miles away.

On the way, they stop to buy some beer.

Later, reportsreach the Leesburg sheriff's office about a plane flying erratically over the town,

a plane perhapsin trouble. Officers arriving at Leesburg Airport at 2:39 a.m. discover Hall's car and

piles of clothing on the ground. No one is around. The runway is dark. While the officers wait, a

Cessna 182 lands. Philip Smith is in the pilot's seat and very drunk. Hall is next to him. In the back

are Lindsay and Sprincis, both naked.

The officers ask Smith to step out. He complies, promptly fails a sobriety test and is arrested

for violating Florida law. A deputy sheriff escorts Smith to his cruiser and drives him to the county

jail. Other officers stay behind interviewing Hall, Lindsay and Sprincis. Hall gets out of the plane.

Lindsay refuses to budge. He is loud, obnoxious and, like Smith, very drunk. He brags about his

flying skills. He refuses to tell the officers his address. His girlfriend Sprincis gives them her address

in Umatilla and gives the same address for Lindsay.

Sprincis tries to persuade Lindsay to leave with her and Debra Hall. He refuses. He tells

Sprincis to "go ahead with" Hall. Lindsay promises to "beat her home anyway." The officers radio

the lieutenant to report Lindsay's recalcitrance. By this time, it is 4:00 a.m. The lieutenant radios

back that Smith has given Lindsay permission to stay in his plane. Sprincis decides to remain with

him. Hall departs in her car, apparently sufficiently recovered from the effects of alcohol. At 4:12

a.m., the officers drive out of the airport, leaving Lindsay and Sprincis there alone. Two of the

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officers park close by, hidden in the darkness, watching the airport entrance and runway, concerned

that Lindsaymight try to take off in Smith's plane. The officers maintain their lookout until 4:41 a.m.

All is quiet, and they leave to respond to another call.

About 5:00 a.m., a lieutenant and his deputy, having left Smith in jail, return to the Leesburg

Airport. It is not yet light. The Cessna is gone. So are Lindsay and Sprincis. Remembering the

address Sprincis had given them, they drive 12 miles to Umatilla. There on the runway of the

Umatilla Airport they find Smith's plane. Sprincis' trailer is a few hundred yards away, across the

street. The door is locked, and when the lieutenant knocks, no one answers. Later that day the

police impound the plane.

These largely undisputed facts were adduced during a two-day hearing before an

administrative law judge on Lindsay's challenge to the FAA Administrator's emergency order

revoking his pilot's certificate. FAA regulations prohibited Lindsay from recklessly operating an

aircraft, 14 C.F.R. § 91.13, and fromacting as a crewmember of a civil aircraft "[w]ithin 8 hours after

the consumption of any alcoholic beverage," 14 C.F.R. § 91.17(a)(1). Attorneys for both sides

stipulated that the only issue at the hearing would be whether Lindsay piloted Smith's plane on its

October 17 flight from Leesburg to Umatilla. The ALJ, for reasons we will describe, found that the

FAA Administrator had not proven his case. The National Transportation Safety Board reinstated

the revocation on appeal.

We have three issues. The first is whether the Board erred in reversing the ALJ's decision.

The second is whether the Board's decision upholding the order of revocation is supported by

substantial evidence. The third is whether, by presenting an affirmative defense, Lindsay waived any

objection to the ALJ's refusal to rule in his favor at the close of the Administrator's case-in-chief.

The Board overturned the ALJ's decision because the ALJ had failed to apply the

preponderance of evidence standard in assessing the Administrator's proof. In order to put the

Board'sreversal in perspective, we need to recount some of the additional evidence produced during

the hearing.

The FAA's investigation revealed that when Debra Hall left Leesburg Airport shortly after

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4:00 a.m. on October 17 she took Smith's keys with her. Unknown to Hall, however, Smith's plane

could be operated without those keys. The pilot-side door did not lock and any sort of key inserted

into the ignition switch would turn on the engine. An FAA investigator called Hall on October 18,

the day after the flights, and asked her whether she knew who flew the plane to Umatilla. Hall said

Lindsay flew it. Asked about the source of her knowledge, Hall statedin language the investigator

recorded in his notesthat because she could not figure out how the plane could have been flown

to Umatilla without the keys, "I confronted [Lindsay] at the jail when I bailed Phillip out [about noon

on October 17] and he told me he flew it to Umatillo [sic]." At the hearing, Hall admitted having told

the investigator that Lindsay piloted the plane to Umatilla. But she then denied having any

knowledge to back up her assertion and said that when she had asked Lindsay at the jail, he told her

he had not flown the plane. The investigator's contemporaneous notes show otherwise, of course,

as does the investigator's testimony at the hearing. It is true, as Lindsay stresses, that at one point

the transcript reportsthe investigatorsaying Hall told him Lindsay flew the plane to "Leesburg." But

this appearsto be either a slip of the tongue or a mistranscription. There is no other indication of any

flight from Umatilla to Leesburg, and the ALJ understood the investigator to have been testifying

about the flight from Leesburg to Umatilla.

When the Administrator rested, Lindsay moved for a judgment vacating the emergency

revocation order on the ground that the FAA had failed to make out a prima facie case against him.

The ALJ denied the motion, and Lindsay proceeded to put on his defense. There is no need to recite

the defense in great detail. The ALJ found Lindsay's witnesses, including Lindsay himself, not

credible. Lindsay testified that after the police left the airport, he and Sprincis got out of the plane,

walked over to a phone booth and called Keith Jordan, a skydiver friend who lived in Leesburg.

Jordan said he received the call about 4:00 a.m. With him in his apartment was Edward Carter, an

aerialphotographer who videotaped skydivers. Carter said he had travelled with Lindsay and Sprincis

to Leesburg the evening before, and had been waiting for them to pick him up so that he could spend

the night in Sprincis' trailer in Umatilla. After Lindsay's call awakened him, Jordan dressed, and he

and Carter drove in Jordan's car to the Leesburg Airport, about 10 minutes away. When they arrived,

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Carter got out of the car, spoke with Lindsay, walked over to the plane with him, and together they

unsuccessfully tried to secure the pilot-side door. Lindsay came back to the car and told Jordan and

Sprincis that Carter was going to fly the plane to Umatilla. Jordan, Lindsay and Sprincis then drove

out of the airport and back to Jordan's apartment, where they spent the night. Carter testified that

he flew Smith's plane to Umatilla, about a 10-minute flight. He talked briefly with the security guard,

Raymond Cruitt, and then walked over to Sprincis's trailer and fell asleep. He heard the officers

knocking on the door of the trailer later in the morning, but decided not to answer.

The holesin thisstory are large, and the ALJ did not believe it. We will put aside the fact that

if Jordan and Carter had arrived at the Leesburg Airport when they said, the officers maintaining

surveillance would have seen them, but did not. The most glaring defect in Lindsay's defense is

elsewherein the utter implausibility of Carter's having flown Smith's plane to Umatilla. Carter was

a pilot, but he was not much of one. Since 1969 he had logged only 100 hours. When the FAA

Administrator started inquiring about whether he still had a valid license to fly, Carter invoked his

Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. Carter had never flown Smith's plane, and he

did not have Smith's permission to fly it on October 17. He was unfamiliar with the Leesburg

Airport. Yet according to him he decided to take off in the dead of night, without lights, on an

unfamiliar runway that dropped off into a lake, in a plane he had never flown, without checking the

oil level in the plane, and without even knowing how much, if any, fuel it had remaining. What was

the urgency that caused Carter to decide to risk his life to get to Umatilla, a mere 15-minute drive

away? When the FAA investigator asked him this rather obvious question before the hearing, Carter

said he had no particular reason. At the hearing he changed his story. He explained that he had to

get back to open up "Skyworld," a skydiving school at the Umatilla Airport, at 7:30 a.m., and when

he met Lindsay and Sprincis at the Leesburg Airport he did not know where Sprincis had left her car.

This is, to put it mildly, lame. Sprincis surely knew where she had left her carat the Shamrock

Lounge, only 3 miles from the Leesburg Airport. All Carter had to do was ask her. Besides, Jordan

was supposedly there with his car. There is no reasonable explanation why, if he were telling the

truth, Carter did not even ask Jordan to give him a lift to Umatilla. Carter still had hours to go before

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he supposedly had to open up at Skyworld. And yet he says he borrowedthat is, stoleSmith's

plane to make the 12-mile trip.

What of Raymond Cruitt, the self-described person responsible for keeping "things clean and

neat and security" at the Umatilla Airport, the person to whom Carter allegedly spoke as he was

walking from Smith's plane to the trailer? In rambling and disjointed testimony, Cruitt said that

Carter had committed "perjury," that Carter had not flown Smith's plane because the actual pilot was

one "Lawrence Eugene Kavel," a member of a group dealing in "hypnosis, mind control, disguises,"

a person Cruitt met some twenty years ago in Washington, D.C., but still recognized through the

darkness despite his older appearance, a person Cruitt thought might be a government agent. Cruitt

"yelled out to him, I said, well who are you screwing over tonight?" and "he says, you better go back

and get in bed because the police are on their way." And so Cruitt went back to bed. Needless to

say, the ALJ found Cruitt to be "unreliable" and attached no weight to his "bizarre" testimony.

Asto the Administrator's witnesses, the ALJ viewed themas "entirelycredible." The ALJ also

found that Debra Hall had made the statements the FAA investigator attributed to her; her contrary

testimony at the hearing was not "credible." As to Jordan and Sprincis, they had an obvious "bias,"

and there was "considerable doubt" about their version ofthe events at the Leesburg Airport. Carter

was simply not "a credible witness."

Despite these findings, the ALJ thought Lindsay had introduced "an element of doubt"

sufficient to preclude a finding that the Administrator had satisfied his burden of proof. Nonetheless,

the ALJ said that he was unconvinced Lindsay "did not commit the alleged violations."

We sustain the Board's ruling that the ALJ misapplied the preponderance of evidence

standard. The ALJ had two versions of the events before him. For the Administrator to prevail, the

ALJ had to find only that it was, in the familiar formulation, "more likely true than not true" that

Lindsay flew the plane to Umatilla. 3 EDWARD J. DEVITT ET AL., FEDERAL JURY PRACTICE AND

INSTRUCTIONS § 72.04 (4th ed. 1987); see Concrete Pipe & Products of California, Inc. v.

Construction Laborers Pension Trust, 113 S. Ct. 2264, 2279 (1993). This standard called for the

ALJto make a comparative judgment about the evidence, rather than a statement about what actually

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occurred. Certainty was not necessary, nor was the absence of any reasonable doubt. As the Board

correctly put it, the ALJ's own findings reveal his belief that it was more probable than not that

Lindsay made the flight.

Asto the Board'sruling that Lindsay violated the regulations, there is substantial evidence to

support it. Someone flew Smith's plane to Umatilla. All the credible evidence points to that someone

being Lindsay. He had already demonstrated no hesitation about flying while intoxicated. At the bar

he offered to fly the plane on its first outing of the night. Drunk or not, he was the only one among

the cast of possible pilots who had the experience and ability to fly out of Leesburg in the dark and

land safely in Umatilla. He had flown Smith's plane before. It is fair to assume that while he was

sitting in the plane waiting for the police to leave, he knew that he could start the engine without

Smith's keys. He was the one who defiantly remained in the plane. He is the one who bragged that

without any means of transportation other than the plane, he would beat Sprincis back to Umatilla

if she drove there with Hall. And he is the one Hall identified as having admitted to being the pilot

on that flight. Substantial evidence is "such relevant evidence as a reasonable mind might accept as

adequate to support a conclusion" (Consolidated Edison Co. v. NLRB, 305 U.S. 197, 229 (1938)),

taking "into account whatever in the record fairly detractsfromits weight" (Universal Camera Corp.

v. NLRB, 340 U.S. 474, 488 (1951)). That standard has been satisfied.

All that remains is Lindsay's claim that the Board erred in making the following ruling:

At the close ofthe Administrator's case the respondent moved to dismiss, arguing that

the Administrator had not established a prima facie case. The law judge disagreed and

denied that motion. On appeal here the respondent challenges that determination.

However, since respondent put on evidence in defense of the charges after the

rejection of his motion to dismiss, we think he effectively waived his right to object

to the law judge's ruling, for once the case is appealed to us, the issue becomes not

the correctness of the law judge's view that the burden of going forward with

evidence had shifted to the respondent, but, rather, the sufficiency of the evidence in

the record, viewed as a whole.

The Board's decision strikes us as entirely correct. The rule it embodies has long governed appeals

in the federal courts. A defendant waives an appeal of the denial of a directed verdict motion by

putting on evidence. The Supreme Court so held in Bogk v. Gassert, 149 U.S. 17, 23 (1893): "A

defendant has an undoubted right to stand upon his motion for a nonsuit, and have his writ of error

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if it be refused; but he has no right to insist upon his exception, after having subsequently put in his

testimony and made his case upon the merits, since the court and jury have the right to consider the

whole case as made by the testimony." See, e.g., Alston v. Bowins, 733 F.2d 161, 163-64 (D.C. Cir.

1984). We have not considered whether all of the Board's previous decisions are consistent with this

approach. Even if some are not, the Board's failure to follow or to explain those decisions is

harmless. 5 U.S.C. § 706. The Administrator's evidence in his case-in-chief surely was, for the

reasons already given, enough to withstand Lindsay's motion.

The petition for review is denied.

Circuit Judge TATEL, concurring in part, and concurring in the judgment: I agree with the

majority that substantial evidence supports the decision of the Board. I write separately to express

a concern that the Board's reasoning regarding the burden of proof and certain related credibility

determinations borders on the arbitrary and capricious.

The ALJ concluded that neither party had "proven" its version of events; neither established

that Lindsay had, or had not, flown the plane. The Board considered this a misreading of the

preponderance ofthe evidence standard. "This is not a complicated case," the Board wrote; Lindsay

"either made the flight the Administrator believes he made or he did not. The law judge's task was

to decide that issue one way or the other." The ALJ, however, had no duty to determine whether

Lindsay did or did not fly the plane. His only duty was to determine whether the party with the

burden of proof had established that its allegations were "more likely than not." The ALJ did just

that, concluding that the Administrator had not proven, by a preponderance of the evidence, that

Lindsay flew the plane.

The Board's confusionand its insistence that the ALJ decide the matter "one way or the

other"is understandable: As a factual matter, Lindsay either was or was not in the pilot's seat that

night. In a legal sense, however, the ALJ's findings were entirely plausible because neither party had

provided him with the quantum of certainty that he needed to conclude that their version of events

had occurred.

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Lindsay, of course, was not responsible for proving he did not fly the plane; indeed, it was

technically possible for Lindsay to have won without presenting any defense at all. But he did present

a case, and his evidence was useful to the ALJ because it "created doubts" in his mind about the

strength of the Administrator's case. This language of doubt is not, as the Board seems to think,

evidence of an inappropriately applied burden of proof. Instead, it is merely one way of articulating

the necessary weighing of evidence that goes on in circumstantial cases like this one. See

Administrator v. Williams, No. Order EA-3588, Docket SE-10463, 1992 N.T.S.B. LEXIS 125, at

*3 n.4 (May 26, 1992) (using language of "reasonable doubt" in a similar context); Administrator

v. Saunders, No. Order EA-3672, Docket SE-10104, 1992 N.T.S.B. LEXIS 189, at *14 (Aug. 29,

1992) (using language of "sufficient doubt" in a similar context). Lindsay's failure to prove that he

did not fly the planeand the doubt that his witnesses cast on the Administrator's casewas thus

entirelyconsistent with the ALJ'sfinding that the Administrator failed to prove his case. As Chairman

Vogt recognized in dissenting from the Board's opinion, the Board's conclusion that the ALJ

improperly applied the burden of proof was incorrect.

The Board compounded its error by failing to understand how Lindsay's witnesses could have

"cast doubt" on the Administrator's case when the ALJ did not entirely believe their testimony.

According to the Board, the ALJ's conclusion that Lindsay was "less than credible" "ha[d] to be

equated" to a belief that Lindsay flew the planei.e. that the ALJ really must have believed the

opposite of Lindsay's testimony. The Board also concluded that the ALJ had "unwittingly" given

credence to the testimony of other witnessesthat he considered biased or not fullycredible. Although

the ALJ may ignore the testimony of witnessesthat appear "lessthan credible," and although the ALJ

may even choose to believe the opposite of the testimony of a witness who appears particularly

deceitful, see 2 Davis & Pierce, Administrative Law Treatise § 11.2, at 188-90 (3rd ed. 1994); cf.

United States v. Zeigler, 994 F.2d 845, 848-50 (D.C. Cir. 1994), nothing requires, as the Board

apparently concluded, that the factfinder must ignore the testimony of "less than credible" witnesses

or must conclude the opposite of that testimony. Testimony by less than credible witnesses may be

useful in several ways. For example, though the ALJ considers a portion of a witness' testimony to

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be deceptive, the rest of it may be credible. Such testimony might also cast doubt on the credibility

or certainty of the Administrator's witnesses, or call into question the logical consistency of the

Administrator's evidence or inferences that he seeks to draw from that evidence. As noted above,

these considerations led the ALJ to conclude that the testimony of Lindsay's witnesses "cast

doubt"apparently significant doubton the Administrator's version of events. See Joint Appendix

at 624, 626, 628, 630 (giving credence to less than credible witnesses).

I can understand the Board's frustration with trying to review seesawing credibility

determinations like those made in this case. In such instances, the Board would be entirely justified

in reviewing the evidence de novo, as it did here, or in directing its ALJs to provide less equivocal

credibility determinations. The Board went further, however, resting much of its decision upon an

apparent misconception of the burden of proof and a sweeping misunderstanding that testimony by

less than credible witnesses can have no role in an adjudication. Since the Board's own finding that

Lindsay violated flight regulations is supported by substantial evidence, I can nevertheless concur in

its reversal of the ALJ. Should its misconceptions regarding the burden of proof and the role of less

than credible testimony affect the results offutureBoard opinions, however, I will come to view them

with even more skepticism.

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