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This Day in FAA History: August 15th

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.

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This Day in FAA History: August 14th

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.”

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This Day in FAA History: August 13th

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.

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This Day in FAA History: August 12th

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.

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This Day in FAA History: August 11th

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.

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This Day in FAA History: August 10th

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.

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This Day in FAA History: August 9th

Full FAA Chronology at this link.
19740809: James E. Dow became FAA’s Deputy Administrator. The appointment was among the last official acts of President Nixon, who had nominated Dow on July 24.
A native of East Machias, Maine, Dow was a graduate of the University of Maine. He entered the Federal service in 1943 as an air traffic controller in CAA’s Central Region. After several promotions in the field, Dow transferred to CAA’s Washington headquarters in 1956, where he served successively as Assistant Chief of both the Systems Engineering and Systems Management Divisions, Chief of the Plans Division, and Director of the NAS Special Projects Office.

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This Day in FAA History: August 8th

Full FAA Chronology at this link.
19460808: An amendment to the Civil Aeronautics Act facilitated the participation of the Weather Bureau in international meteorology and gave the Bureau the responsibility of acting as a clearinghouse for research in aeronautical meteorology. The Bureau was also charged with providing for the collection and dissemination of weather observations made by pilots in flight. (See September 15, 1950.)
19500808: To help CAA personnel keep pace with swift advances in aeronautical science, Congress enacted legislation allowing the Secretary of Commerce to detail agency personnel for advanced training at civilian or other institutions or at schools which the Secretary operated.
19500808: Following field tests, CAA consolidated airport traffic control towers and airway communications stations at 16 smaller airports in the continental United States.

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This Day in FAA History: August 7th

Full FAA Chronology at this link.
19640807: Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution supporting intervention in the Vietnam conflict. U.S. involvement in the war had begun with the assignment of advisors to South Vietnam in the mid-1950s, and its scope increased greatly in the mid-1960s. The last U.S. troops left Vietnam in March 1973. (See Spring 1975.)
19670807: In a rule effective this date, FAA set equipment and procedural standards under with general aviation pilots operating properly equipped airplanes were authorized to land under Category II weather minimums–a 1,200-foot runway visibility range and a 100-foot decision height. (See October 2, 1964, and November 3, 1967.)
19680807: An FAA rule effective this date required deployment-assisting devices on parachutes for static-line jumps.

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This Day in FAA History: August 6th

Full FAA Chronology at this link.
19450806: The United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, followed by a second on Nagasaki on August 9. These attacks, and the Soviet declaration of war against Japan on August 8, led to Japan’s surrender on August 14 and the end of World War II. As a result of the war, a total of 1,961 men and 70 women, representing nearly 20 percent of CAA’s personnel, left the agency during 1939-45 to serve in the Armed Forces.
19540806: CAB announced the signing of an agreement with Norway, Sweden, and Denmark for the operation of an air route by U.S. and Scandinavian airlines between Los Angeles and Scandinavia via Greenland.
19640806: An FAA rule effective this date required the closing and locking of crew compartment doors of scheduled air carriers and other large commercial aircraft in flight to deter passengers from entering the flight deck either intentionally or inadvertently (see May 7, 1964).