He's angling for a CJ this time.
The question is, what could he do with it if he got one?
One of the things that puzzled me from the Cirrus case was his violent reaction to Cirrus' attorney asking questions about losing his medical thirty years earlier (to refresh folks' memory, he threatened...on the record during the depostion...to sic the FBI on the attorney).
Certainly, one can understand his reluctance to discuss it. But back in 1999, he freely answered questions about it in Federal court. Did a pretty good job of it, and ~12 years later, could have made even a stronger case that it was old data and not applicable in the 21st century.
But yet...there was the total refusal to answer ANY questions. And the claim that it was an invasion of privacy.
It could very well be that he no longer has a license.
The natural flow of questions about the 1980 action during the Cirrus deposition would be to ask whether he *currently* had a license and medical. He hasn't been listed in the FAA pilot database for quite a while.
I thought, originally, that he'd asked to not be listed due to privacy concerns. But the FAA web page says only that they'll withhold one's
address. There are plenty of celebrities with pilot licenses listed; some with blank addresses, others with what are probably business addresses.
But Jim Campbell doesn't seem to be listed.
If Campbell didn't have a license/medical, he had to stop
any questions at all about the status of his medical or pilot license or it would become public. Eventually, it led to him caving and handing the aircraft back before the judge could rule that he had to answer the questions.
If the FAA had acted to pull his tickets, it would be protected by privacy laws unless he appealed to the NTSB...as he did in the '80s. So no one would know...unless he was forced to answer questions about it during a deposition.
There's one little bit of additional data on this. When Campbell agreed to give Cirrus back the airplane, he gave them the key to the hangar. Everyone assumed the he'd taken the plane back to his airpark home. Seems weird that he'd give them, essentially, the key to his house.
But if he didn't have a valid license, he couldn't have legally flown the airplane away. If it were found at his airpark address, the FAA could ask some hard questions on how it got there. And if he *had* flown it illegally, it might quash any chance of his getting his license back in the future. So the solution to that would be a rented hangar at the airport where the airplane has originally been repossessed. Hence the free handing over the key.
Just a set of guesses, mind you. But I'm guessing that if Campbell *does* get access to a CJ, he'll probably have to ride in back....
Ron Wanttaja