In re Holiday Airlines Corp. (1980)
Decided: May 28, 1980 · Rehearing denied: June 24, 1980 · Docket: 77-2400 · Opinion: Chambers, J.
Primary-text identity
The FAA-hosted PDF begins with a July 1980 administrative letter on a different issue. Its appendix contains the complete reported Holiday Airlines opinion, 620 F.2d 731–735. This summary uses that judicial text, not the letter, publisher headnotes or adjacent unrelated opinions. The scan’s OCR is imperfect. Full FAA-hosted scanned source.
Facts
Pacific Propeller overhauled an aircraft propeller in Washington, shipped it back to Holiday Airlines in California and billed USD 21,259.58. It filed an aircraft lien notice with the FAA in Oklahoma City under the Washington chattel-lien law. After Holiday’s bankruptcy, the trustee contested the lien. The aircraft was sold under a stipulation that kept proceeds available for the lien dispute. Judicial opinion pp. 732–733 and footnotes.
Holding and reasoning
The court affirmed the lien’s validity. Washington law governed the lien arising from Washington repair work despite the aircraft’s California location in the bankruptcy. Washington allowed the lien despite surrender of possession. The federal aviation recording scheme displaced the state place-of-filing requirement; filing at the FAA was sufficient in these circumstances. The propeller repair could support the lien against the aircraft in which it was reinstalled. Judicial opinion pp. 733–735.
Practical impact
A Washington aircraft-repair lien cannot be evaluated solely by asking whether the county auditor holds a filing or the repairer retains the aircraft. Federal recording and applicable state law both matter. The decision does not establish that an airport abandonment sale extinguishes a senior recorded aircraft lender. Opinion.
Currentness and later treatment
Current RCW 60.08.010–.040 and 14 C.F.R. §§ 47.11, 49.17 were independently retrieved; they address lien creation, sale evidence and federal recording. The opinion’s historical federal section numbers are not today’s section numbers. The FAA’s 1988 final recording rule cites Holiday Airlines in discussing the state-law validity/federal-recording distinction. That agency treatment does not clear every statement in the 1980 opinion or every later appellate decision. Current Washington chapter; full 14 C.F.R. § 49.17; 1988 final rule, official Federal Register issue pp. 1913–1915.
The full official Florida Fourth District opinion in Creston Aviation v. Textron Financial, 900 So. 2d 727 (2005), cites Holiday but holds that federal recording did not eliminate Florida’s county-filing validity requirement. This is an out-of-state application of a different state statute, not an overruling of the Ninth Circuit or authority to apply Florida perfection rules in Washington. It cautions against generalizing the 1980 filing holding to every state’s lien. Complete official Creston opinion.
good_law_status remains needs_verification. The final rule and Creston support
only these actual later-treatment descriptions; comprehensive subsequent
appellate treatment remains unfinished research.
Applies in →
Legal information, not legal advice. Verify current law and subsequent treatment before relying on this historical opinion.