How can you overturn the "interpretation" of the original author?
First, it's not the original author making these interpretations, it's a staff attorney in the Office of the Chief Counsel. The original author is a pilot/flight instructor type in Flight Standards, not a lawyer, and s/he is not authorized to make legal interpretations of the regulations. Technically, the power to interpret those regulations lies with the Administrator, but in the FAA, the Administrator has delegated that authority to the Chief Counsel.
When a request for an interpretation comes into the Chief Counsel's office, the attorney to whom that task is assigned will consult with the people in Flight Standards (possibly including the original author if s/he still works in that slot), but at the end of the day, the attorneys make the interpretation, not the original author. In some cases, what the regulation actually says legally is not what the original author intended it to say, and in those cases, the attorneys write the interpretation based on law, not on intention -- this has bitten Flight Standards on several occasions. Because of this, Flight Standards is now working much more closely with the Chief Counsel's office during the rulemaking process so they don't run into such problems. But at the end of the day, once the regulation is written, the lawyers get the final say
within the FAA on what it actually says.
However, as I said above, someone can challenge that Chief Counsel interpretation in Federal court, and the court can overrule the FAA's official interpretation of the regulation (i.e., the one that came from the Chief Counsel). If it gets to that point, as I also said, the Chevron deference doctrine creates a very high barrier to having it thus overturned, but it is theoretically possible even if I can't think of any FAA regulation cases where it's happened (maybe Mark knows).
Of course, up until a couple of years ago, the Federal Aviation passed by Congress
required deference to the FAA's interpretation of its own regulations unless that interpretation was "arbitrary, capricious, or otherwise not according to law" -- a higher barrier than the Chevron deference, and one which is virtually insurmountable, as seen in the famous Merrell case. For that reason, it's not surprising that it's hard to find any cases of the courts overturning an FAA interpretation of its own regulations. The recent PBOR legislation deleted that required deference, but I know of no cases of FAA regulation interpretation which have reached the US Court of Appeals since that law became effective, so there's no way to know for sure what impact it might have on any future FAA regulation interpretation questions.
Maybe they could force it to be rewritten for clarification or to minimize misinterpretation...
Neither the Chief Counsel nor the courts can "force it to be rewritten", only tell Flight Standards what the regulation legally says as written, and let then Flight Standards decide where to go from there. Sometimes they live with it, sometimes they start the rulemaking process to change the regulation. In some cases, where it's just an administrative/typographic sort of error, that can be done quickly. In others, it takes a couple of years to do the full ARC/NPRM/Comment/FR process.
...but as you can see from this thread there are people who are going to find fault and argue for no other real purpose other than to argue.
You got that right.
Sorry...
