ark@rabbit.UUCP (Andrew Koenig) (08/19/84)
... administrative hearings. For instance: pilots are licensed by the Federal Aviation Administration. This license is a privilege, not a right, and can therefore be withdrawn by the FAA. The FAA also has the power to assess fines for people who have violated its regulations, which therefore effectively have the force of law, although they have been approved by no legislature. Loss of license, of course, means end of career for any professional pilot. If the FAA thinks you have broken a regulation that is important enough to warrant removing your license, they send you a letter to that effect. You can either send them your license or ask for a hearing. At these hearings: the hearing is not a trial, so you are not entitled to counsel. You can consult a lawyer if you insist, but the lawyer cannot appear at the hearing with you. If the FAA finds that you have consulted a lawyer, they will take this as evidence of guilt. Since this is a "fact-finding" hearing, not a trial, there is no independent judge. Judge and prosecutor are one and the same. There is no jury. If you put up an active defense and lose, as is likely, the penalties will be more severe than if you just caved in at the beginning, because you have a "bad attitude." The investigation is not bound by the rules of evidence. Thus, for example, you do not have the right to cross-examine witnesses. The FAA, however, does have the right to cross-examine witnesses you bring for your defense. You do not have the right to remain silent. Silence is presumed to be evidence of guilt. Lest you think I am being overly paranoid, consider this. A few years ago, a student pilot complained to the FAA that a local instructor had broken the regulations by signing his logbook to attest to instruction that the instructor had not given. As evidence, the student produced his logbook, that had indeed been "signed" with a rubber stamp with the instructor's name. The instructor was summoned by the FAA, and his defense was that he had not signed the logbook, that the rubber stamp was a forgery, and that he could document that he was not anywhere in the area at the time he allegedly made these logbook entries. Confronted by this, the student broke down, and confessed, in writing, that he had forged the entries in his own logbook in order to discredit the instructor, against whom he had a grudge. Although the FAA had lost the only evidence on which to base their case, they ordered the instructor's license revoked ANYWAY. More than two years and $17,000 in legal fees later, the instructor appealed his case to the National Transportation Safety Board (yet another administrative hearing), and won. The FAA appealed to Federal court. The court not only upheld the NTSB, but they ordered the FAA to pay the instructor's legal fees! Last I heard (about two months ago), the FAA has appealed the court ruling. I don't want to think about what has happened to the instructor's career in the meantime. Incidentally, all evidence I have seen indicates that this instructor was generally upright, well-liked, a scrupulously fair instructor and businessman, and generally a pillar of the community. His real "crime" seems to have been to be too critical of the FAA in some of their policies. If you're interested in more details, including names and dates, go to your local library and rummage through some of this year's earlier issues of the Aviation Consumer magazine.