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As the door began opening on the commercial jet epoch, White House concern mounted. President Eisenhower frankly wondered whether the U.S. was indeed ready for jet transport. "Somebody," he said in the spring of 1955, "has got to take a look." There followed a nine-month committee survey, which reported appalling conditions. A few months later, Ike called in Major General Edward Curtis, Army airman in World Wars I and II (Chief of Staff, Strategic Air Force, Europe), and then (as now) a vice president of Eastman Kodak Co., told him to get going on an analysis of the problems and to bring back the answers. By May 1957> "Ted" Curtis' report was in. Recommendation: absorption of the old CAA into a new, independent Federal Aviation Agency, with combined military and civil traffic control in the hands of one civilian boss.
Bear Traps & Wing Flaps. While the report made the casual rounds of 70-odd Capitol committees and agencies, it was Oklahoma's Democratic Senator A. S. (for Aimer Stillwell) "Mike" Monroney, among all his colleagues, who most clearly sensed the challenge and grabbed it. As chairman of the Senate Aviation Subcommittee, Mike Monroney ran the report through his committee and got legislation moving. With single-minded disregard for political pitfalls and bureaucratic bear traps, Monroney thrashed his way through the congressional jungle with expert leadership. One member of his safari: Pete Quesada, whose good World War II friend and commander, Dwight D. Eisenhower, had just named him Special Assistant for Aviation.
Even as Monroney and Quesada labored with airlines' experts, scientists and other technicians, the wings of tragedy were flapping noisily around them: an Air Force F-100F collided over Nevada with a United Air Lines DC-7 in April 1958, killing 49; next month an Air National Guard T-33 jet trainer rammed into a Capital Airlines Viscount over Maryland, killing twelve. With renewed urgency, Monroney and his staff analyzed the obsolescent aviation laws, scrapped them all and began over again. By the end of the 1958 congressional session, the new FAA act was written into law and signed by the President. After aperies of talks with the President, Pete Quesada, already retired from the Air Force as a lieutenant general, resigned his Air Force commission, cut clean away from the military, and opened the FAA for business on Jan.1, 1959. "It was the hardest thing I ever did, resigning from the Air Force," says Quesada, "but the law [requiring a civilian head] was clear as hell." The law, by implication, also called for a strong, experienced administrator, and Quesada's whole life and personality fit the law like a made-to-order lock nut.