Appeal No. 2002-0767
Application No. 09/382,381
establishing a prima facie case. To the extent that the examiner
may be relying on inherency to establish anticipation, we note
that it is well settled that inherency may not be established by
probabilities or possibilities, but must instead be "the natural
result flowing from the operation as taught." See In re Oelrich,
666 F.2d 578, 581-82, 212 USPQ 323, 326 (CCPA 1981). In the
present case, the disclosure of Denninger does not appear to
provide an adequate factual basis to clearly establish that the
natural result flowing from following the teachings of that
reference would be a method as in appellants' claim 14 on appeal,
or an apparatus like that of appellants' claim 18 including
"means for determining a location separation distance between
said first location and said second location" and "means for
generating a deviation signal of said second location with
respect to a predetermined aircraft flight path vector, wherein
said deviation signal is a function of said first signal and said
location separation distance."
It follows from the foregoing that we will not sustain the
examiner’s rejection of claims 1 through 8 and 10 through 20 on
appeal under 35 U.S.C. § 102(e) based on Denninger.
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