Appeal No. 2000-0085
Application No. 08/802,582
reference has no relation whatsoever to decompression
protection in an aircraft and that there would be no reason
for one skilled in the art to look to the teachings of
Dernbach in developing an aircraft decompression protection
system. Appellants further argue that the examiner has
provided no specific or inherent motivation for the proposed
combination of the three applied references and that the three
applied references could not be combined in an operative
manner consistent with their intended uses, so as to result in
appellants’ claimed subject matter. In this regard,
appellants assert (brief, page 6) that the examiner has
utilized appellants’ own disclosure in the present application
as a road map for piecing together unrelated references
without citing any legitimate motivation for the combination
and thereby engaged in an improper hindsight reconstruction of
the claimed subject matter.
Assuming for argument sake that Dernbach is analogous
prior art because it is reasonably related to the general
problem of over-pressure relief that appellants have
confronted, we nonetheless share appellants’ view that there
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