"T o d d P a t t i s t" wrote in message
...
"Gary Drescher" wrote:

Interpretations and official
guidance as to what the FAA thinks regulations mean come
from the FAA's Chief Counsel's Office.

Yes, that's another source.

Saying it's "another source" implies (at least to me) that
they are roughly equivalent sources of interpretation.
They aren't. If there's any conflict, the Chief Counsel's
interpretation overrides anything in the AIM.

Well, whether that's true or not is one of the main points of disagreement
that's come up in this thread.

My argument is that 1) by common sense, it would not meet the legal standard
of reasonableness for the FAA to publish an explicit definition in the AIM
(for example, the AIM's new definition of "known icing conditions", which
unambiguously excludes *forecast* conditions) and then have the Chief
Counsel insist that the legally valid interpretation of the term is
something else entirely; and 2) empirically, there seem to be no known cases
in which the FAA has ever even *tried* to bust a pilot for interpreting a
regulatory term in a way that irrefutably accords with the AIM's explicit
definition of that term.

For those reasons, I don't believe that the Chief Counsel has carte blanche
to "override" the AIM. But if you have evidence or arguments to the
contrary, I will gladly consider them.

--Gary