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Fidel" with a Philosophy. In the 14 months since he took over the newly created FAA, Pete Quesada's impassioned, inflexible sense of duty has turned the Air Age inside out. With a fighter pilot's life-and-death instinct, he cut through political niceties, stepped on time-honored short cuts, and enforced a tight discipline with a determined single-mindedness that inevitably raised howls everywhere, except from the public. Airline pilots, who over the years became powerful in both the industry and in Washington and grew a little complacent in the process, yelled "Gestapo!" and called Quesada "Fidel" when he cracked down. The airlines' bosses themselves have been stomped on for infractions of rules. Only trouble, says United Air Lines President W. A. Patterson, comes from FAA men, who have a "certain lack of diplomacy." But, adds Patterson, "I have always found General Quesada ready to correct any complaints brought to him." Most airline chiefs agree with Trans World Airlines' Charles Thomas, sometime (1954-57) Secretary of the Navy: "Quesada is terrific." The plain fact is that only a man like Pete Quesada, with a well-trained respect for the uncompromising qualities of an airplane, can do the job that needs doing and make it stick. "The whole philosophy of Government regulation," says he, "is to protect the public's interest. But history finds that the public is silent; the public sits there and just hopes that the agency that it set up will take care of their interest. I want FAA to do exactly what all Government regulatory agencies are to do: pursue the public's interest."
Nomads & Chaos. In the care of U.S. bureaucracy, that concern went abegging for years. The old Civil Aeronautics Administration, created in 1940, turned out to be about as effective as a dime-store lock. A multitude of civil air regulations were written—and they were good enough to set the standards for world aviation—but the problems of aviation grew faster than they could be solved. Of the nine CAAdministrators who paraded like nomads (average tenure: 24 months) through the agency, not one could muster either enough Administration backing or personal force and conviction to bridge the widening chasm between the forward-leaping Air Age and the hoary bureaucracy of the Commerce Department.
By the mid-50's, the Air Age was near chaos. Military jets whisked through civil air lanes like shuttles on a loom. Neither civil nor military pilots had much of an idea who was going where, for CAA and military traffic-control operations were two entities, without coordination or communications.