Court Opinion

ID: 9470557
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 03:09:16.401111+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:41:58.349662
License: Public Domain

VAN GRAAFEILAND, Circuit Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part:
Because air safety ranks somewhere in pecking order between motherhood and the American flag, it would be easy to concur fully in the majority opinion. In explaining my inability to do so, a good starting point is the following excerpt from the district court’s opinion:
While there is no evidence of an actual danger to public safety on any flight in which defendant bypassed the FAA regulations, that fortunate happenstance is totally irrelevant.
In pursuance of this logic, the district court fined appellants $21,000 because instructions on the first aid kit in appellants’ German-built cargo plane were printed in German. Section 121.309(a) and (b) of Vol. 14 of the Code of Federal Regulations provides that no person may operate an airplane unless it is equipped with one or more first aid kits. Although section 121-309(b)(3) requires only that such a kit be “clearly identified and clearly marked to indicate its method of operation”, the district court charged that, for such instructions to be clear, they must be in “language understandable to the crew.” Assuming without deciding that “language understandable to the crew” was necessary to identify the first aid kit on appellants’ plane and to indicate its “method of operation”, there is no proof that one or more members of appellants’ crew did not understand German. Indeed, the fact that some entries in the plane’s logbook during the period at issue were made in German would indicate that such understanding did exist.
Appellants were fined another $21,000 because placards on the crew’s life raft were printed in German. Once again, the Government completely failed to establish that appellants’ crew, experienced in plane operation and international travel, were unable to identify the device in question as a life raft or to understand how it operated. Moreover, the district court erred prejudiciously when it permitted the FAA maintenance inspector to testify he “felt” that instructions in German were contrary to regulations but prohibited defense counsel from eliciting a contrary answer on cross-examination.
Although, as the district court found, there was “no evidence of an actual danger to public safety” from violations such as the use of German language on the crew’s first aid kit and life raft, the district court’s conclusion that “this fortunate happenstance is totally irrelevant” is not entirely true. Seven of the twenty-eight flights, for which liability totalling $94,500 has been imposed, were conducted entirely outside the United States. Six of these flights were between Managua, Nicaragua and Caracas, Venezuela, while the plane was leased to Lineas Aereas de Nicaragua, that country’s national airline. The seventh was between San Jose, Costa Rica and Caracas. The Government did not allege in its pleadings that FAA regulations were violated on those flights. This, I suggest, was because the FAA, and perforce the district court, were without jurisdiction to impose liability for conditions existing during the seven flights, which, as the district court found, posed no danger to public safety.
The FAA is empowered “to promote safety of flight of civil aircraft in air commerce” by promulgating appropriate standards and regulations. 49 U.S.C. § 1421. “Air commerce”, as defined in 49 U.S.C. § 1301(4) and (20) refers only to flights that originate or terminate in the United States or its territories or which “may endanger safety” in flights that do. The majority’s assertion that flights in and out of the United States “may most certainly be endangered on the facts proved at trial”, is unwarranted. There is not one iota of proof in the record to rebut the district court’s finding of no actual danger to public *638safety, much less sufficient proof to make that finding clearly erroneous.
As pointed out in our first opinion, 635 F.2d at 147, the Government has “thrown the book” at appellants in an attempt to secure the largest possible fine. This is FAA’s admitted policy:
... [W]hen we feel there is a serious violation or serious numbers of violations that requires significant deterrent effect, we have been forced to go out and scrape up every possible violation of the Regulations that is appropriate in order to compute these large penalties.
Testimony of Clark Onstad, Chief Counsel, FAA before the Subcommittee on Aviation of the Committee on Public Works and Transportation, House of Representatives, 96th Cong., 2d Sess. July 1, 1980, Record of Hearing on H.R. 7488 at 38.
Even the district judge, whose sympathies quite obviously were not with appellants, could not abide the Government’s attempt to make two flights out of each carriage of goods from the United States to Europe because the plane had to refuel at Gander, Newfoundland.
I agree with my colleagues that appellants violated the law and must be held to account. I would affirm a judgment against appellant Landy in the amount of $250,000 and against appellant International Aircraft Leasing, Inc. in the amount of $125,000. To the extent that the judgments appealed from exceed those amounts, I respectfully dissent.