This Day in FAA History: December 22nd

Full FAA Chronology at this link.
19671222: FAA renamed its Installation and Materiel Service the Logistics Service to describe better the service’s revised functions. (See May 16, 1962 and January 19, 1970.)
19701222: FAA established the Office of Environmental Quality and simultaneously abolished the Office of Noise Abatement, which formed the nucleus of the new office. This organizational change reflected FAA’s expanding responsibilities in such areas of environmental quality as aircraft noise abatement, sonic boom, smoke emission, exhaust pollution, and aircraft waste. FAA issued an order on February 19, 1971, transferring the aircraft noise abatement research program to the Systems Research and Development Service. (See July 21, 1967 and September 10, 1978.)
19801222: FAA placed the Office of Aviation Medicine under the executive direction of the Associate Administrator for Aviation Standards. Although no longer reporting directly to the Administrator, the Federal Air Surgeon retained delegated responsibilities for medical determinations.
19831222: FAA established the first Airport Radar Service Area (ARSA) at Austin, Tex., followed on January 19, 1984, by the second at Columbus, Ohio. A recommendation of the National Airspace Review (see June 7, 1982), the ARSA concept was developed for airports with insufficient traffic to warrant a Terminal Control Area (TCA). Within ARSAs, air traffic control provided: separation between IFR aircraft; traffic advisories and conflict resolution for IFR and VFR traffic so that targets do not merge at the same altitude; and traffic advisory service to all participating aircraft as well as arrival sequencing at the primary airport. ARSAs were intended to replace Terminal Radar Service Areas (TRSAs) nationwide, and differed from TRSAs in that their shape was standardized to the maximum extent possible. Radio contact with air traffic control was mandatory for all aircraft in an ARSA, whereas participation was voluntary in a TRSA. Controllers were required to provide traffic advisories to all pilots in an ARSA. In a TRSA, by contrast, controllers provided traffic advisories concerning non-participating VFR aircraft on a workload-permitting basis. After validating the ARSA concept at Austin and Columbus, FAA began establishing additional ARSAs in 1985. There were 121 ARSAs in operation in September 1993, when FAA began using its new airspace classifications (see December 17, 1991), at which point TRSAs and ARSAs were no longer separate airspace classifications.
20051222: Runway 18R/36L opened at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport.
20081222: Department of Transportation Secretary Mary Peters announced that FAA would work with carriers to reduce voluntarily scheduled operations at New York’s LaGuardia Airport from 75 to an average of 71 per hour as part of continued efforts to address chronic congestion at the delay-prone airport. The airport ranked just 28th for on-time departure performance over the first 10 months of 2008. Data showed that lowering the hourly cap on operations from 75 to 71 could reduce delays by up to 41 percent, saving up to $178 million in delay related costs per year. (See December 8, 2008; March 11, 2009.)
20151222: FAA announced a comprehensive settlement agreement with Boeing Commercial Airplanes (BCA) that resolved multiple pending and potential enforcement cases. Under the agreement, BCA pledged to implement and improve several certification processes to further enhance the airworthiness and continued compliance of all BCA products. BCA’s obligations committed the company to meet specific performance targets. The targets were designed to enhance BCA’s early discovery and self-disclosure of potential regulatory compliance problems, as well as the timely development and implementation of effective corrective actions. The company also had to make an immediate payment to the United States Treasury in the amount of $12 million and would face stiff penalties for failing to follow through on its commitments.
20181222: Because of a lack of 2019 appropriations funding, the FAA, among other agencies, furloughed employees. Many employees in essential positions, such as air traffic controllers, remained on the job, but without pay. The furlough ended on January 28, when the President signed a continuing resolution providing agencies affected by the lack of an appropriation, funding for three weeks. (See October 1, 2013.)