Appeal No. 96-4005
Application 08/183,531
commands and potential flight deviations are inherent in any flight path. For all of the above reasons,
the Examiner's rejection of claim 1 under 35 U.S.C. § 103 is sustained.
We now consider dependent claims 2 and 5 and refer to our earlier discussion of Appellant's
arguments concerning the decreasing sample region size feature. While we found Appellant's arguments
to be unpersuasive with respect to claim 1, we reach the opposite conclusion with respect to dependent
claims 2 and 5. In contrast to claim 1, each of dependent claims 2 and 5 recite such decreasing sample
region size feature. The relevant portion of claim 2 recites:
and the third region being a least
volume and most distant from the aircraft;
Similarly, claim 5 recites:
a fourth sample region located furthest
from said aircraft in relation to said
first, second, and third sample regions,
said fourth sample region having a
minimum width dimension relative to the
width dimensions of said first, second
and third sample regions.
The Examiner has cited passages at lines 16-21 and 40-53 of column 4 of Feuerstein
in support of the position that the above claimed features are disclosed in Feuerstein.
However, these excerpts from Feuerstein are concerned merely with sampling rate and
flight computation variability, respectively, and, in our view, fall well short of describing the claimed
decreasing sample region size as distance from the aircraft increases. In view of the above, we agree
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