Category: TDiFH

Full FAA Chronology at this link.
19390819: National Aviation Day occurred for the first time on a continuing basis. In 1937, President Roosevelt had designated May 28 as National Aviation Day for that year only (see that date). No day had been designation in 1938. In a proclamation dated July 25, 1939, President Franklin Roosevelt applied this designation to August 19, 1939, and to August 19 of each succeeding year, in honor of Orville Wright’s birthdate. The proclamation was issued pursuant to Public Resolution No. 14, 76th Congress, approved May 11, 1939 (53 Stat. 739).
19400819: CAA presented Orville Wright honorary Pilot Certificate No. 1 during a National Aviation Day ceremony dedicating the Wright Memorial at Dayton, Ohio. (See April 6, 1927.)
19660819: A strike by the International Association of Machinists halted for 43 days the flight operations of Eastern, National, Northwest, TWA, and United. This was the longest and costliest strike in U.S. airline history to that date.

Full FAA Chronology at this link.
19410818: President Roosevelt announced that Pan American Airways would operate an air ferry service to fly aircraft, cargo, and passengers to the African continent in support of the Allied war effort. At the President’s direction, CAA on September 10 granted temporary authority to Pan American to operate the ferry service, flying from Miami, Fla., via Puerto Rico and Brazil, to Liberia and Nigeria. The rights would expire in 5 years, or 6 months after the Secretary of War notified CAA that the service was no longer required.
19420818: Letters from the Acting Secretary of War and the Secretary of the Navy to the Secretary of Commerce formalized the decision that CAA would perform its war support functions in a civilian status.
19660818: FAA commissioned the nation’s 300th civilian airport traffic control tower at Hillsboro, Ore. Dedication ceremonies were held on August 28.

Full FAA Chronology at this link.
19540817: Administrator Frederick B. Lee placed in effect a reorganization of CAA (see June 2, 1949). He established a position of Assistant Administrator for Operations in the Office of the Administrator to exercise direct supervision over the Office of Airports, Office of Federal Airways, Office of Aviation Safety, and the Washington National Airport. The administrative staff offices were placed under an Assistant Administrator for Administration, also responsible for supervising the Aeronautical Center.

Full FAA Chronology at this link.
19650816: A series of three Boeing 727 accidents within three months began as a United Air Lines flight crashed into Lake Michigan for undetermined reasons, killing all 30 people aboard. On November 8, an American 727 crashed in Kentucky on approach to Greater Cincinnati Airport, killing 58 of the 62 people aboard. CAB later determined the probable cause was the crew’s failure to properly monitor the altimeters. On November 11, a United 727 crash landed at Salt Lake City. All 91 occupants survived the impact, but 43 died of the effects of postcrash flames and smoke (see September 20, 1967). CAB later cited the probable cause as the pilot’s failure to arrest an excessive descent rate. On November 12, FAA declared it could find no pattern in the mishaps and hence it would be premature to ground the 727, about 190 of which were in operation.
19850816: Transportation Secretary Dole released a report on FAA’s Flight Standards programs by the Safety Review Task Force that she had created in December 1983 to examine the safety programs of all the Department’s modal administrations.

Full FAA Chronology at this link.
19330815: The Aeronautics Branch announced the abolition of solo pilot licenses and gave the solo flying privileges of that license to student pilots. The change was part of the Branch’s response to curtailed appropriations. (See September 15, 1933.)
The Aeronautics Branch also announced that it now required airlines to make detailed reports of all forced landings experienced on interstate scheduled passenger flights. Previously airlines had been requested only to report the number of forced landings.
19350815: Pioneer aviator Wiley Post and humorist Will Rogers were killed when an aircraft piloted by Post — a hybrid, pontoon-equipped Lockheed Orion-Explorer — plunged into a lagoon on takeoff, 16 miles north of Point Barrow, Alaska.
19360815: Bureau of Air Commerce regulations governing instrument flight became effective. Under the new rules, all civil pilots desiring to fly intentionally by instruments over a civil airway were required to have an instrument rating and a Federally licensed aircraft equipped with two-way radio and approved instrument flying equipment.

Full FAA Chronology at this link.
19350814: An amendment to the Air Mail Act of 1934 (see June 12, 1934) became law, permitting the Postmaster General to award air mail contracts for a three-year period. The amendment also authorized moderate increases in route mileage, which had been frozen at 25,000 miles in the 1934 act to prevent extension abuses.
19570814: August 14, 1957: President Eisenhower signed the Airways Modernization Act (Public Law 85-133). The act established the Airways Modernization Board charged with “the development and modernization of the national system of navigation and traffic control facilities to serve present and future needs of civil and military aviation.”

Full FAA Chronology at this link.
19610813: Standard instrument departure (SID) procedures went into effect for the first time for civil aircraft at New York International Airport. In the form of pictorial charts, the SID’s simplified pilot-controller exchange of complex clearance information.
19750813: FAA completed its longstanding program to implement the ARTS III automated radar terminal system at the nation’s busiest terminals on this date with the commissioning at the Dallas-Fort Worth Regional Airport. All 61 ARTS III systems were now operational in the contiguous states, as well as one in Hawaii and one in Puerto Rico.

Full FAA Chronology at this link.
19490812: Effective this date, CAB awarded experimental five-year certificates authorizing scheduled all-freight operations to four airlines: Slick Airways, the Flying Tiger Line, U.S. Airlines, and Airnews. The four were among the few independent freight lines that had survived a rate war with the scheduled air carriers. In the long term, the most successful of them proved to be the Flying Tiger Line, which had been formed on July 25, 1945, by veterans of the American Volunteer Group that had served in Asia under Gen. Claire Chennault.
19700812: FAA established a Technical Assistance Staff headquartered in the United States in the Office of International Aviation Affairs to provide a variety of short-term technical assistance in aviation to foreign countries anywhere in the world. During the first year of its existence, this staff dispatched 44 technicians on short-term assignments to 13 countries.

Full FAA Chronology at this link.
19260811: William P. MacCracken, Jr., took office as the first Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Aeronautics (see October 1, 1929). He thus became the first head of the Aeronautics Branch, created in the Department of Commerce by Secretary Herbert Hoover to carry out the Secretary’s responsibilities under the Air Commerce Act of 1926. MacCracken, who had assisted in drafting that act, brought to the position experience as a World War I Army pilot, as chairman of the American Bar Association’s committee on aviation law, and as general counsel of National Air Transport, a contract mail carrier he helped organize in 1925.

Full FAA Chronology at this link.
19610810: For the first time the Federal government employed armed guards on civilian planes. (See May 1, 1961.) The first such guards were border patrolmen from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. In March 1962, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy swore in FAA’s first “peace officers,” as Special U.S. Deputy Marshals. Graduates of a special training course at the U.S. Border Patrol Academy, all of the men worked as safety inspectors for Flight Standards and only carried out their role as armed marshals on flights when specifically requested to do so by airline management or the FBI. (See February 21, 1968.)
19650810: San Francisco-Oakland Helicopter Airlines initiated the first scheduled air cushion vehicle (hovercraft) service in the United States between Oakland and San Francisco.