This Day in FAA History: September 25th

Full FAA Chronology at this link.
19500925: Overruling the Civil Aeronautics Board, President Truman permitted the merger of American Overseas Airlines into Pan American World Airways. (See October 24, 1945.)
19610925: FAA, NASA, and the Defense Department agreed on a plan for the research and study phase of the commercial supersonic transport (SST) program. Assigning FAA responsibility for overall program leadership and management direction, the plan provided for a Supersonic Transport Steering Group–headed by the FAA Administrator and including the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Materiel and NASA’s Director of Advanced Research Programs–to formulate broad policy and give overall guidance for the Federal role in the program. The Steering Group would be supported on the working level by the SST task group, which had been in operation for some time. Comprised of designated FAA-DOD-NASA representatives, the task group was to continue coordinating the SST activities of the three agencies. (See July 24 and December 11, 1961.)
19670925: An FAA report released on this date concluded that the economic effects of the development of general aviation airports were beneficial for five communities studied: Hereford, Tex.; Sumter, S.C.; Hayward, Calif.; Frederick, Md.; and Fairmount, Minn. FAA found that airports served as a catalyst for business growth, helping to provide industrial jobs for machine-displaced farm laborers, as well as providing operational bases for aerial crop seedings and crop spraying.
19700925: The Departments of Justice and Transportation signed a memorandum of understanding dividing responsibilities for responding to hijackings. The FBI had jurisdiction when an aircraft was neither airborne nor moving on the runway for purposes of takeoff or landing. The pilot retained command at other times, and FAA’s recommendations to him had precedence. A further agreement in December 1971 assigned the pilot the responsibility of signaling whether the aircraft should be disabled or stormed. On February 26, 1975, FAA and the FBI signed a new memorandum of understanding governing responsibilities during a hijacking. Following guidelines provided by the Anti-Hijacking Act of August 5, 1974 (see that date), the new agreement extended FAA jurisdiction to include the period from the closing of all external doors following embarkation until the opening of one such door for disembarkation. Both the FAA and the FBI agreed to fully consider each other’s views, as well as the views of the airline and the pilot in command, before initiating law enforcement action.
19780925: A midair collision over San Diego between a Pacific Southwest Airlines Boeing 727 and a Cessna 172 caused more fatalities than any previous civil aviation accident within U.S. airspace. All 137 persons aboard the two aircraft and seven on the ground were killed. Both aircraft were transponder-equipped and were operating in clear weather under local air traffic control when they collided at 2,600 feet. Both pilots had been warned of the presence of the other aircraft. The PSA pilot, which was overtaking the smaller plane, had received clearance for visual, “see-and-avoid” separation procedures after reporting to controllers that he had the Cessna in sight.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) concluded that the accident’s probable cause was the PSA crew’s failure to comply with the provisions of a maintain-visual-separation clearance, including the requirement to inform the controller if they no longer had the other aircraft in sight. The Board cited as a contributing factor the procedures that allowed controllers to authorize visual separation procedures when the capability to provide radar separation was available.
NTSB member Francis H. McAdams dissented, citing the use of visual air traffic control (ATC) procedures as part of the probable cause rather than merely contributory. He also listed a number of contributing factors, mostly inadequacies of the ATC system. Among these were failure to resolve an automated conflict-alert alarm that the approach controller had disregarded on the assumption that the pilots were maintaining visual separation. (NTBS later adopted McAdams’ viewpoint in an August 1982 amendment that included both ATC and pilot failings in the probable cause finding.)
The San Diego accident followed another midair collision that had occured on May 10, 1978, between a Falcon Jet and a Cessna 150 over Memphis, Tenn., with the loss of six lives The NTSB’s finding of probable cause in that case cited the failure of controllers to maintain proper separation as well as the pilots’ failure to see and avoid each other. The two accidents set off intense criticism of FAA’s ATC program and the pace of its plans to develop an airborne collision-avoidance system. (See December 27, 1978.)
19850925: American Airlines agreed to pay a $1.5 million civil penalty, the largest levied by FAA to that date. Most of the safety violations cited against American had been uncovered in a special inspection that summer.
19900925: FAA released its first strategic plan, addressing six issue areas as well as aviation in the 21st Century. The plan, dated August 1990, was presented in the framework of the Secretary’s National Transportation Policy (NTP), which Secretary Skinner had presented to President Bush on March 8, 1990. The NTP presented 169 guidelines and 65 legislative, regulatory, budget, and program initiatives to improve the nation’s transportation network.
19900925: The United Nations voted to ban virtually all air traffic with Iraq, with the exception of certain humanitarian flights. (See August 2, 1990, and January 16, 1991.)
19980925: FAA announced the implementation of a final rule requiring employment background investigations and criminal history checks for airport security checkpoint screeners and screener supervisors. This new rule responded to the mandate in the Federal Aviation Reauthorization Act of 1996 and was additionally recommended by the White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security. The rule also required airport operators and air carriers to audit employment history investigations. (See August 21, 1998; November 20, 1998.)
20060925: A report issued by the Department of Transportation Inspector General outlined a host of problems with FAA’s “RESULTS” contracting program, but acknowledged that FAA had moved quickly to shut the program down. The audit was launched at the request of Senators Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) after a whistleblower highlighted examples of waste and abuse. One of three such contracting programs used by FAA, RESULTS provided a list of 142 pre-qualified vendors to which the agency could award support contracts. Since its inception, the program had awarded more than 114 contracts with a potential value of $543 million. The whistleblower uncovered abuse in one contract. The Office of the Inspector General widened its investigation to cover the entire program. The investigation found that because of inadequate program controls, labor costs were much higher than in other FAA contracting efforts. In addition, RESULTS contracts were awarded without sufficient competition or price analysis, and inadequate oversight of contract performance contributed to further cost overruns.
20140925: Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx announced FAA had granted regulatory exemptions to six aerial photo and video production companies in a first step to allowing the film and television industry to use unmanned aircraft systems in the NAS. FAA determined that the UAS to be used in the proposed operations did not need an FAA-issued certificate of airworthiness based on a finding they did not pose a threat to national airspace users or national security. (See September 10, 2014; December 10, 2014.)
20140925: FAA evacuated the Chicago ARTCC in Aurora, IL, just before 6:00 a.m. local time, because of a fire reported in a basement telecommunications room. FAA managed traffic through adjacent high-altitude radar centers in Cleveland, Indianapolis, Kansas City, and Minneapolis. Those facilities worked with the TRACON facility in Elgin, IL, and other surrounding large TRACONs in areas such as South Bend, IN, Rockford and Moline IL, and Milwaukee, WI, to track flights on radar and manage departures and arrivals in Chicago ARTCC airspace. FAA re-routed overflights around the airspace. FAA brought in a clean-up crew at the ARTCC to begin drying out water-damaged equipment and to clean and sanitize the area after a fire and attempted suicide in the telecommunications room. After inspecting the damaged equipment, FAA decided to replace the central communications network in a different part of the same building to restore the system as quickly as possible. The agency restored services at the Chicago ARTCC on October 13. (See November 24, 2014.)