2008
Robert Laughlin Park, 89, a retired aviation lawyer and administrative law judge who later became an official with an
airline industry association, died Dec. 26 of kidney disease at the Falcons Landing retirement facility in the Loudoun
County community of Potomac Falls.
Mr. Park was born in Detroit and came to Washington in his teens. He graduated from the old Western High School in
1936. After graduating from Duke University in 1940, he completed two years at Harvard Law School before serving in
the Coast Guard during World War II. He was a communications officer on troop transport ships in the North Atlantic and
the Mediterranean.
After the war, he completed his law degree at Harvard and worked in Massachusetts briefly before coming to
Washington in 1948.
He spent 28 years as a legal officer with the old Civil Aeronautics Board (now the Federal Aviation Administration). He
was a prosecutor, appellate lawyer and, for 12 years, an administrative law judge. He presided over many cases dealing
with airline mergers and the allocation of airline routes. Mr. Park was the agency's chief judge at the time of his
retirement from the government in 1976.
He then joined the Air Transport Association of America as its first travel agent commissioner. In that position, he
established an office that adjudicated contractual disputes with airline travel agents and heard appeals concerning the
accreditation of agents. He retired in 1987.
Mr. Park lived in Falls Church for many years and was a member of Lewinsville Presbyterian Church in McLean, the
International Aviation Club of Washington and various charitable and educational organizations.
His wife of 57 years, Mary Curry Park, died in 1999.
Survivors include two children, Lucy Dugger of Richmond and Timothy Park of Manassas, and three grandsons.
-- Matt Schudel