The Legal Side of Aviation‘ FROM
THE GERMAN or
VIATION is interesting others be
sides the admiring public.
It is
giving the jurists new and difiicult tasks. Such questions as we never had to answer before are coming up: To whom does the air belong? Who is ruler above the surface? Who gives laws for the aviator; who is to judge him and punish him? Who, finally, is
responsible for the damage which his flights may entail? These questions suggest unlimited and dif’ficult possi
Pnomarsson
HANS SPERL
ward off dangers which may threaten it from aviators. This view must be condemned by every practical person, for if it prevailed there would be an end not only to the political and military security of a state but also to the security of the home, which would have no defense against injuries which may
come from above. Dangers from this direction are of various sorts. Recall only the possibility that contagious
bilities. Up to our time the state was assumed
diseases may be carried in balloons, that the throwing out of ballast, the falling of parts of the machinery or the ex
to have control over the surface of the earth, with that part of the atmosphere
plosion of the balloon itself may make trouble below. Wherever men meet
above it in which men move about
men the restraint of law is necessary. The state must interpose, violently if
daily, and into which buildings, trees and plants project; no one could go higher, and the question of authority
over the upper strata would have been dismissed as purposeless casuistry. Now it is different; military balloons, sports men's balloons, scientific balloons, even passenger balloons cut the ether in
every direction, and the upper air is rapidly becoming a highway for the use of all peoples. All this involves the necessity for laws and government, if peace and justice are to be main tained.
The French jurists preach a doctrine which must touch the freedom-loving
nature of mankind sympathetically. They say that the air is free from all control of law, a No Man's Land to which no state can lay claim; only in
so far as the state lying beneath is constrained by the necessities of self preservation can it adopt measures to
- Translated by Roy Temple House. Weatherford,
Okla.
need be, and impose a system, without whose salutary operation men cannot meet each other peacefully, even in the ether. For this reason another group of jurists give up the contention that
all the air is a free and lawless expanse, to the extent of allowing that an air ship which is near the earth belongs to the country it floats above, and is amenable to all its laws and restrictions;
but that when it soars into the upper air it becomes entirely free. But how high does this lower stratum extend? On this question there is not agree ment. Some say as high as the highest structures on the earth— 1,000 feet, that is, or the height of the Eiffel Tower —others again, as high as a cannon
ball can be shot into the air.
A third
says that since effective photographs
can be taken from a balloon at a height of 5,000 feet, the state must have control to that height in order to protect its fortresses and military works against
