Full FAA Chronology at this link.
19450419: Forty-one airlines from twenty-five nations created a voluntary organization, the International Air Transport Association (IATA), at Havana, Cuba, to prevent airlines from practicing unethical methods of setting rates and schedules. Other international airlines subsequently joined the association. IATA succeeded the International Air Traffic Association, which had been formed at The Hague in 1919.
19580419: CAA commissioned the Phoenix air route traffic control center.
19710419: FAA issued its first type certificate for a West German helicopter, the MesserschmittBolkow-Blohm BO-105A.
19710419: The Soviet Union launched Salyut 1, the first of a series of orbiting space stations. Soviet cosmonauts used Soyuz spacecraft to reach these stations for increasingly long missions, including a stay of over 200 days aboard Salyut 7 in 1982. (See May 14, 1973.)
19780419: The All-Weather Operations Division of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) voted to adopt the FAA-sponsored time reference scanning bean (TRSB) microwave landing system for future use at the world’s airports. A special technical panel had earlier recommended the U.S.- sponsored system (see March 16, 1977), but the small size of the panel and the heated nature of its deliberations had partially discredited its conclusion. As a result, backers of the competing British and U.S.-Australian systems staged worldwide lobbying campaigns to support the adoption of their system. When the ICAO body began its meeting in early April, the decision appeared to be further complicated by the late entry of a West German MLS based on distance-measuring equipment (DME). The FAA delegation, however, agreed to begin research on how to incorporate the 360-degree azimuth coverage of the DME system into the TRSB. This helped to clear the way for the selection of TRSB by a vote of 39 to 24, with 8 abstentions. Although the TRSB was now referred to the Air Navigation Council of ICAO for the definition of standards, Third World nations at the conference succeeded in gaining agreement to a ten-year extension (from 1985 to 1995) of the period during which existing instrument landing systems would be protected. (See January 28, 1982.)
19930419: In testimony on Capitol Hill, Acting Administrator Del Balzo announced that FAA had modified its plan to consolidate its en route centers and Terminal Approach Control facilities (TRACONs) into 23 large facilities (see March 22, 1983). Instead, the agency planned to operate the 22 existing centers, 170-175 stand-alone TRACONs, and 5 consolidated TRACONs (see October 23, 1991).
19950419: A bomb blast at the Alfred P. Murrah federal office building in Oklahoma City killed more than 160 persons and injured hundreds of others. FAA personnel participated in relief efforts.
20130419: FAA took the next step in returning the Boeing 787 to flight by approving Boeing’s design for modifications to the 787 battery system. Boeing’s changes addressed risks at the battery cell level, the battery level and the aircraft level. FAA subsequently planned to issue instructions to operators for making changes to the aircraft and to publish in the Federal Register the final directive to allow the 787 to return to service with the battery system modifications. FAA also required airlines that operated the 787 to install containment and venting systems for the main and auxiliary system batteries and to replace the batteries and their chargers with modified components. (See March 12, 2013; April 25, 2013.)
20190419: A custom-made drone flew a human kidney 2.8 miles to a nearby hospital in Baltimore in the world’s first drone delivery of a human organ. The nighttime drone flight followed a three-year collaboration among doctors, researchers, engineers, and aviation experts at the University of Maryland Medical Center and the Living Legacy Foundation of Maryland, a Baltimore-based organization that oversees organ procurement in the state.