This Day in FAA History: August 19th

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.
19800819: An in-flight fire on a Saudi Arabian Airlines L-1011 killed all 301 persons aboard. Smoke inside the aircraft prompted a return to Riyadh shortly after takeoff. The aircraft landed normally, but was destroyed by fire on the taxiway. Saudi investigators concluded that the fire probably began in the aft pressurized cargo compartment, but were unable to determine its cause. The accident was followed by development of improved liner material for L-1011 cargo compartments, and by FAA action to upgrade cargo compartment safety standards (see May 16, 1986).
19870819: Effective this date, a Special Federal Aviation Administration Rule (SFAR) altered the Los Angeles, Calif., terminal control area (TCA). The rule raised the upper limits of the TCA from 7,000 to 12,500 feet above mean sea level to enable air traffic control to provide terminal air traffic control service to arriving and departing aircraft in the TCA. The action also eliminated the visual flight rule (VFR) corridor in one area of the TCA to minimize the mix of controlled and uncontrolled operations in the vicinity of Los Angeles (see August 31, 1986, and March 10, 1988).
19970819: The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) ruled that all parties, including FAA, executive boardrooms, and the “shop room floor,” shared some culpability for the crash of ValuJet Flight 592. The aircraft probably would not have crashed into the Florida Everglades on May 11, 1996, if FAA had followed a decade-old recommendation to require fire detection and suppression systems in aircraft cargo holds. NTSB also listed as “probable causes” the failure of the maintenance contractor SabreTech to properly “prepare, package, identify and track” hazardous oxygen generators that were improperly placed in the cargo hold, and ValuJet’s failure to oversee SabreTech. In addition, NTSB said FAA’s failure to adequately monitor ValuJet’s maintenance program and its maintenance contractors, the failure to respond adequately to prior oxygen generator fires, and the airline’s failure to train its employees about handling hazardous material also contributed to the causes of the tragedy. (See May 11, 1996.)
20110819: FAA issued a final rule prohibiting air carriers and other certificate holders from employing certain former FAA aviation safety inspectors as company representatives to the agency for a period of two years after they had left the agency. These restrictions applied if the former FAA employee directly served as or was responsible for the oversight of a flight standards service aviation safety inspector and had direct responsibility to inspect, or oversaw the inspection of, the operations of the certificate holder. This rule also applied to persons who owned or managed fractional ownership program aircraft used to conduct certain commercial operations. (See November 20, 2011.)
20110819: FAA issued a new rule requiring scheduled airlines to install ice detection equipment in their existing fleets or to update their flight manuals to ensure crews know when to activate their ice protection systems. For aircraft equipped with an ice-detection system, the new rule mandated that the system alert the crew every time they needed to activate ice protection. The system could either automatically turn on the ice protection or pilots could manually activate it. For aircraft without ice-detection equipment, the crew had to activate the protection system based on cues listed in their airplane’s flight manual during climb and descent, and at the first sign of icing when at cruising altitude. The rule applied only to in-service aircraft that weighed less than 60,000 pounds because studies showed smaller planes were more affected by undetected icing or late activation of the ice protection system. (See April 26, 2007.)