Full FAA Chronology at this link.
19381227: President Roosevelt announced an experimental Civilian Pilot Training Program involving 330 pilots and 13 colleges and supported by National Youth Administration funds. (See June 27, 1939.)
19631227: The civil-military common system of air navigation and air traffic control moved forward a step with a final action on FAA-DOD agreements defining the use, technical standards, and equipment characteristics of a key component–the air traffic control radar beacon system (ATCRBS). (See September 11, 1961, and March 4, 1976.)
19741227: A House subcommittee chaired by Rep. Harley O. Staggers (D-W.Va.) issued a report criticizing FAA as sluggish, insufficiently strict in its aircraft certification procedures, and too solicitous of the interests of the aviation industry. Cases cited by the committee included the agency’s handling of the DC-10 cargo door problem (see March 3, 1974). The committee also faulted FAA for slowness in requiring the Ground Proximity Warning System on airliners, a criticism underlined by the recent crash of a TWA jet (see December 1, 1974). On December 28, public confidence in FAA was further weakened by an ABC television broadcast, prepared by science editor Jules Bergman, that portrayed the agency as lax on postcrash survival and other safety issues.
19781227: FAA Administrator Bond and Secretary of Transportation Brock Adams announced a regulatory program to reduce the risk of midair collisions by 80 percent. Formulated in response to criticism of FAA after the San Diego midair collision (see September 25, 1978), and submitted as a notice of proposed rulemaking, the program included
* Establishing new voluntary Terminal Radar Service Areas (TRSAs) at 80 air carrier airports (see December 22, 1983), and establishing new Terminal Control Areas (TCAs) at 44 additional airports.
* Lowering the floor of positive area control from 18,000 feet to 10,000 feet over the States east of the Mississippi and much of California, and to 12,000 feet over the rest of the contiguous 48 States.
* Establishing a new flight category, controlled visual flight rules, for positive airspace below 18,000 feet, which would allow non-instrument rated pilots to use the airspace above 10,000 feet with radar separation provided by air traffic controllers.
* Requiring all aircraft operating in TRSAs and TCAs to have altitude-reporting transponders installed by July 1981. All transponders installed after July 1982 would have to incorporate the new Discrete Area Beacon Systems (DABS), which would provide an automatic data link with a ground-based collision avoidance system (see March 4, 1976 and June 23, 1981).
* Requiring all airliners and air taxi aircraft to carry an airborne “active” Beacon Collision Avoidance System (BCAS) by January 1985. A proposed national standard for such systems had been issued earlier in December. (See June 23, 1981.)
These proposals elicited a massive negative public response, much of it orchestrated by the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA). On September 7, 1979, Administrator Bond announced he had withdrawn all the en route proposals. Although the general plan to increase the number of TCAs temporarily remained in effect, FAA gradually withdrew most of the proposed new TCAs. (See May 15, 1980.)
19851227: Near-simultaneous Arab terrorist attacks on airports in Rome and Vienna caused the death of 20 persons, including four of the terrorists, and injured approximately 120. Five of the victims killed were U.S. citizens. The attacks centered on the check-in counters of the Israeli airline El Al. Libyan leader MuamMarch Qaddafi praised the terrorists, thus contributing to tensions between his nation and the United States. (See February 11, 1986.)
19881227: A presidential proclamation extended U.S. territorial jurisdiction from three to twelve nautical miles from the nation’s coasts, and FAA at the same time extended certain controlled airspace and air traffic rules to coincide with the new limits.
20011227: Four FAA facilities in the Eastern Region – the New York TRACON, the New York, and Washington Air Route Traffic Control Centers, and the Philadelphia tower – implemented what was called the “Newark Chokepoint Flip/Flop” project. This involved switching flight paths and eliminating a crossover pattern affecting hundreds of aircraft daily to increase capacity.
20101227: Alfred Kahn, the architect of the historic deregulation of the airline industry, died. As head of the Civil Aeronautics Board in 1977-1978, Kahn oversaw the Carter Administration’s airline deregulation policies. In October 1978, President Carter appointed him as his anti-inflation czar with a mandate to curb the rising costs in food, medical care, and energy. Kahn spent most of his career as a professor at Cornell University. (See October 24, 1978.)
20101227: FAA issued a proposed airworthiness directive that, if finalized, would mandate software upgrades to onboard aircraft collision avoidance devices manufactured by Aviation Communication and Surveillance Systems, a unit of L-3 Communications Holdings. FAA proposed the directive after reports of anomalies with the devices during a test flight over a high-density airport. Operators had 48 months after the effective date of the AD to install the software upgrade.
20201227: President Trump signed into law H.R. 133, an Act making consolidated appropriations for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2021, providing coronavirus emergency response and relief, and for other purposes. The bill included mandates for FAA to reform its certification processes. Among other things, the bill
* Required aviation manufacturers to adopt safety management systems;
* Ordered an independent review of Boeing’s organization delegation authorization (ODA), safety culture, and capability to perform FAA-delegated functions;
* Reformed the FAA’s greater oversight of manufacturer’s ODA units and FAA-designees working within those units;
* Authorized civil penalties against aviation manufacturer supervisors who interfere with or place undue pressure on other employees who are empowered to act as FAA designees in finding that a design or product complies with design requirements;
* Required FAA to approve each new designee who performs those functions;
* Authorized more than $75 million over three years for FAA to recruit and retain engineers, safety inspectors, human factors specialists, software and cybersecurity experts, and other qualified technical experts;
* Required FAA to consider whether there comes a point at which a derivative of an old aircraft design should no longer be certificated as a derivative instead of as a new design;
* Locked in new requirements on the disclosure of safety-critical systems;
* Expanded whistleblower protections;
* Required FAA to review pilot training, including manual flying skills training, and the assumptions relied upon by FAA and manufacturers when designing an airplane, and to work with the international community to improve pilot training globally; and
* Ensured better understanding of human factors and how to integrate them into the aircraft certification process.
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This Day in FAA History: December 27th
