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“Practicing engineering without a licence”? Under the normal meaning of the words, that would mean hiring yourself out as an engineer for money when you are lot licenced to do so. If they get that charge to stick, then the law must be very badly worded.

I guess that they are just pe-o-ed that someone who didn’t suffer through five years of engineering school could do better work than those who did.

I wonder why the PoL article on South Dakota aviation refers to Andrews Air Force Base, which is halfway across the country in Maryland.

The South Dakota Governor talked about Ellsworth Air Force Base, logically enough, since it’s right there in Rapid City, SD.

But Lacy says he filed the complaint because the report “appears to be engineering-level work” by someone who is not licensed as a professional engineer.

This is almost Kafkaesque. At the risk of stating the obvious, “practicing engineering without a license” refers to setting up a business and charging people for your services without having the proper credentials. This charge would be funny – your analysis is too good – if Kevin Lacy was not trying to sic the law on David N. Cox in an attempt to shut him up. Kevin Lacy should be fired immediately and an investigation should be made to determine if he was trying to use his position to intimidate David N. Cox. I don’t know if that is against the law in North Carolina, but what the heck, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

Andrew L. Ritter, executive director of the engineers licensing board, said it will take three or four months to investigate Lacy’s allegation against Cox. He said there is a potential for violation if DOT and the public were misled by “engineering-quality work”- even if the authors did not claim to be engineers.

And while we are at it, I would suggest that a complaint be made against Andrew L. Ritter to the Bar Association since he is clearly practicing law without a license. On second thought forget about that. According to Kevin Lacy’s logic, Andrew L. Ritter could not be accused of practicing law without a license since his legal analysis is clearly not lawyer quality work.

The Board should remove Lacy’s license for actions tending to bring the Profession into disrepute.

We will see if North Carolina has a professional Board of Engineering Licensing, or just a bunch of political hacks sucking on the public teat.

There are other ways to ‘practice engineering’ besides running your own engineering company, since having a Professional Engineer license confers more privileges than supervising junior engineers. A big one that comes to mind is that a PE license is considered sufficient credentials to be called as an expert witness in court.
That being said, the article seems to imply that no one actually claimed to be a PE and no one put their seal on the report. You need a license to claim to be an engineer, but you don’t need one just to write a high-quality report on a topic that may be of interest to engineers.

Concerning the engineer licensing story.
Come on, you lawyers can’t figure this out? When the facts are for you, pound the facts. When the facts are against you, pound the table.
This Ritter fellow can see that he has been out-flanked by some solid, though “uncertified”, engineering. So his only recourse is to pound his opponent on everything else EXCEPT the facts.