Appeal No. 1997-1577 Page 13
Application No. 07/941,466
There is no statement that those skilled in the art tried
to print out a hard copy of the navigational database and were
unable to. Thus, there is no evidence of long-felt need and
failure of others.
We have no evidence that those skilled in the art tried
to print out a navigational chart from the visual database and
were unable to do so. On the other hand, we have no factual
evidence in the record of generating a hard copy of a
navigational chart correlated to the visual database in the
prior art.
Looking to the procedural burdens placed upon the
examiner, as stated by the court in In re Rijckaert, 9 F.3d
1531, 1532, 28 USPQ2d 1955, 1956 (Fed. Cir. 1993), "[i]n
rejecting claims under 35 U.S.C. Section 103, the examiner
bears the initial burden of presenting a prima facie case of
obviousness." The asserted problem in the prior art that was
solved by the appellants’ invention was to generate a hard
copy of the navigational chart which is correlated to the non-
real-world visual database, so that the pilot would have a
navigational chart that was consistent with the display. The
examiner merely asserts that (answer, page 8) generation of
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