Posted: September 16th, 2017

and recklessly with extreme indifference to human life or during the course of a serious felony Theft A criminal taking of the property or

and recklessly with extreme indifference to human life or during the course of a serious felony Theft A criminal taking of the property or services of another without

consent Assault The crime or tort of threatening or attempting to inflict immediate offensive physical contact or bodily harm Battery The crime or tort of

intentionally or recklessly causing offensive physical contact or bodily harm that is not consented to by the victim Note: All law definitions were copied from

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of Law

Chapter One Conclusion
Unlike many books on aviation law, this text begins at the beginning, not in the middle of modern culture and modern transportation. To some, this might seem to be a

waste of time, but I firmly believe in telling stories from the beginning and not from the middle or end.

If the law student is to fully understand law, she or he must

understand human nature and its irregular and sometimes backwards development. What we learned centuries ago must be relearned in every generation; else we will be

doomed to repeat the unseemly history of fits and starts and make no further progress toward what past generations knew to be the better way forward. As a U.S. Air

Force pilot, one of the first things I learned in pilot training was that for each note, caution,

or warning in the “dash one,” something not quite right or something

dangerous or deadly had occurred, which warranted the inclusion of these reminders to avoid reliving the past. In a very narrow sense, each succeeding generation of

pilots was reminded to be particularly careful to not repeat the past. And for as long as there will be training for pilots, this practice will continue.

However, in the broader sense, all of human history is not uniformly conditioned to avoid past mistakes and failures: not even in our present day educational system.

So we listen to and watch the nightly news presenters tell us how that members of our regional society have not followed the law, but rather purposefully disobeyed the

law to gain for themselves an advantage over others. And we also learn that laws that apply to the regular citizenry, do not equally apply to the law-makers in the

U.S. Congress or to the President of the United States. I find it ironic that civilizations of the ancient past had a better way of making laws and enforcing them than

we do today in the United States.

And I wonder if we in the present shouldn’t consider apologizing to “The Greatest Generation” for how we’ve ignored what they taught

us and how we’ve ignored their wisdom and instead acted foolishly. But all is not lost, because we in the aviation industry have paid attention to our aviation

history, and we’ve worked hard to preserve the best examples and to teach those examples to all newcomers.

I am proud to be a pilot, and I’m proud o f my colleagues in

aircraft maintenance for ensuring that “lessons learned” are revered and passed on. In many ways the aviation community is its own clan. The maintenance crewmembers

working on a commercial aircraft are a clan, with many of the same features as the ancient clans. The pilot team on the flight deck is a part of a larger clan of

commercial airline pilots. An instructor/student pilot team is part of the greater collegiate aviation program. The professor who teaches in front of a classroom of

students is functioning as a clan leader,

especially when the class is divided into specialized groups to perform separate tasks. The director, or chair, or program

coordinator for an aviation program is as much the clan leader as clan leaders were in ancient times. Whether your aviation program must conform to program outcomes-

based education or competency-based education, each academic approach holds sacred specific knowledge, skills, and abilities that must be passed on in order to assure

continued flight and ground safety. We should be grateful to Hammurabi and Moses, and deities who influenced them, for creating for us today a model for effective

behavior, as ruled by law.