Appeal No. 2004-0352 Page 2
Application No. 09/716,767
BACKGROUND
The appellant’s invention relates to a force sensor rod for an aircraft actuator
system (claims 1-5 and 9-22) and to a method of assembling such a force sensor
(claims 6-8). An understanding of the invention can be derived from a reading of
exemplary claim 1, which appears in the appendix to the Brief.
The prior art references of record relied upon by the examiner in rejecting the
appealed claims are:
Ward et al. (Ward) 3,561,263 Feb. 9, 1971
Dubuque 4,097,163 Jun. 27, 1978
“Tension/Compression Load Cell TC-1500,” Kulite Semiconductor Products, Inc.
(Kulite)1
Claims 1-22 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as being unpatentable over
Ward in view of Dubuque and Kulite.2
Rather than reiterate the conflicting viewpoints advanced by the examiner and
the appellant regarding the above-noted rejection, we make reference to the Answer
(Paper No. 15) for the examiner's complete reasoning in support of the rejection, and to
1The effective date of this publication is not known. However, since it was provided by the
appellant in an Information Disclosure Statement (Paper No. 5), it is presumed to be prior art and its use
as such has not been challenged by the appellant.
2Throughout the prosecution of this application, the rejection was stated by the examiner as
“Claims 1-5 rejected . . . as being unpatentable over . . . Ward . . .in view of Dubuque.” Claims 6-22 were
not included, but were separately treated in the subsequent explanations of the rejection. In addition,
Kulite was applied against claims 2, 5, 9-11 and 13 in these explanations, although it was not recited in the
statement of the rejection. However, in view of the fact that the appellant has not taken issue with this
error and has argued the patentability of claims 6-22 and the applicability of the teachings of Kulite, we
have considered the rejection as if it had been stated in this manner.
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