- Grand Teton National Park has become a popular U.S. destination for heli-skiing, with commercial helicopter operators landing to deliver and retrieve skiers and snowboarders in locations otherwise inaccessible or accessible only with great physical difficulty. Other users of the park's back country have begun to complain to the National Park Service (NPS), that the noise of the helicopters has become almost continual in some areas, where it is destroying the tranquility of the back country experience and driving the wildlife away.
I. Analyze whether the NPS, acting on its own authority, can legally ban helicopters from landing and taking off at locations within the park? Identify the applicable governmental power and explain your legal reasoning clearly in proper legal terminology.
II. Analyze whether the NPS, acting on its own authority, can legally ban helicopters from flying low over the park? Identify the applicable law and its source and explain your legal reasoning clearly in proper legal terminology.
III. If you determined that the NPS could not, acting on its own authority, accomplish either of both of the foregoing, then identify the law and procedures the NPS and any other government agency involved would be required to follow in order to legally accomplish the task(s), explaining your reasoning clearly in proper legal terminology.
- A couple of pilots are about to fly their personal airplane to another airport for lunch, their regular Saturday ritual, when they learn that the FAA has established Temporary Flight Restrictions for national security reasons over a college along their route where the President is speaking at the graduation ceremony. The pilots are annoyed by this inconvenience, especially because they dislike this President, so they talk about using some tape to temporarily change the aircraft's registration number, then flying right through the TFR, figuring that if they're spotted the feds won't be able to track them down because they'll be looking for the wrong airplane.
I. If they carry out this scheme, will any aviation-related federal crimes be involved?
II. If so, what are the potential penalties?
- You are the director of flight operations for a commercial air- and space-lift company that has developed an air launch system comprised of a large fixed-wing turbojet-powered aircraft (“mother ship”) that takes off horizontally carrying a rocket (and its payload) to about 50,000’, where it releases the rocket. The rocket then ignites and carries its payload to low earth orbit. After the payload separates from the rocket at about 370,000’ and flies into low earth orbit, the rocket returns to earth for a vertical landing by parachute at a downrange location. The mother ship returns for a normal airplane landing at the mission’s point of origin.
I. Assuming a flight goes according to plan, at what points in the mission profile described does the operation leave airspace and enter space on the ascent and leave space and re-enter airspace on descent? Name, describe, and explain the reasoning behind that altitude being internationally accepted as the line of demarcation between airspace and space.
II. Identify the international treaty that gives the underlying nation complete and exclusive sovereignty over the airspace above that nation, and that serves as a basis for that nation exercising legal regulatory authority over the portion(s) of that flight conducted in that airspace.
III. Identify the international treaty that is the basis for the law governing operations in space.
IV. The flight goes according to plan until the point where the descending spent rocket’s parachute fails to open, causing it to fall at high velocity onto a cruise liner at sea, causing considerable damage to the vessel and death or injury to many persons aboard. Apply the appropriate provision of the treaty you identified in your answer to 3, above, to determine liability under international law for that damage.
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