America's first air traffic controllers worked with blackboards, maps and mental arithmetic
Before radar, keeping planes apart on US airways meant chalk, paper charts and quick sums in a controller's head. The agency that grew out of those beginnings, the Federal Aviation Administration, now certifies pilots, runs air traffic control and even guards rocket launches, and its roots go back to a 1926 law.
The foundation was the Air Commerce Act of May 20, 1926, passed because airline and aircraft makers argued flying would never pay without federal safety rules. It gave the Secretary of Commerce the job of licensing pilots, certifying aircraft, writing traffic rules and building airways. A new Aeronautics Branch took over, inheriting a network of lighted airways that the Post Office had started, and it added radio beacons as navigation aids.
Renamed the Bureau of Air Commerce in 1934, the office persuaded several airlines to open the first three traffic control centres, then took them over itself in 1936. A 1938 law moved civil aviation into an independent Civil Aeronautics Authority, which could also set fares and assign routes. Two years later Franklin D. Roosevelt divided it: one body handled control and certification, while a separate board handled accident investigation and airline economics. During and after the Second World War the controllers extended their reach to takeoffs and landings, and radar helped them cope with the postwar surge in flying.
Jet travel and a string of midair crashes, above all the 1956 collision over the Grand Canyon, produced the Federal Aviation Act of 1958. The Federal Aviation Agency was created that August, with Elwood R. Quesada, a former Air Force general who had advised Eisenhower, as its first head. It gained sole charge of a combined civil and military navigation system. In 1967 it joined the new Department of Transportation and took its present name.
Headquartered in Washington, D.C., the agency trains staff at the Mike Monroney Aeronautical Center in Oklahoma City and does research near Atlantic City. Its airports office hands out $3.5 billion a year in grants, and its NextGen programme is rolling out satellite-guided approaches, including routes for air ambulance helicopters.
Source: Federal Aviation Administration
