National Affairs: Defiance & Determination

The crash of National Airlines' Miami-bound DC-6B threw an eerie flash of light across one of the darkest problems of U.S. commercial aviation: the stubborn campaign by top brass of the Air Line Pilots' Association (A.F.L.-C.I.O.) against the efforts of the Federal Aviation Agency to enforce stricter pilot and airline compliance with U.S. air-safety regulations.

While experts were still collecting the North Carolina wreckage, the head of the National Airlines branch of the pilots' union, Captain Robert J. Rohan, fired off a telegram to FAAdministrator Elwood Quesada suggesting a charge that made more responsible pilots' union members gasp. The FAA's recently instituted pilot check procedure, Rohan implied, may have caused both the crash of National's DC-6B and the crash of a National-operated DC-7B (with 42 dead) last November over the Gulf of Mexico. FAA's pilot-proficiency tests require pilots to go through "approaches to stalls and unusual maneuvers . . . even though . . . these maneuvers are not necessary, and are deleterious to the air frame, and may eventually lead to the failure," wrote Rohan. National's pilots, he added flatly, would refuse to take further FAA proficiency tests "until this matter is resolved."

That matter was resolved quickly enough. As FAA's "Pete" Quesada quickly pointed out, "the maneuvers required in pilot-proficiency checks place less stress and strain on the aircraft than that frequently encountered in routine and regularly scheduled operations." He was backed unanimously by airline officials. National Airlines' Vice President L. W. Dymond hurriedly said that the problem was a result of "local misunderstanding"; the pilots would indeed continue to take such tests—or else lose their licenses. Still, the telegram served to dramatize the pilots' union feud with General Quesada's administration: a feud based principally on the fact that in his 13 months as boss of civilian and military air operation, tough, dedicated Pete Quesada (TIME, July 6) has cracked down mercilessly on slipshod maintenance and flying procedures that have bedeviled the airlines for years.

No Nonsense. Quesada, retired Air Force general officer and at 55 still a first-class flying man, took over his new job at a time when air-traffic control in the U.S. was a dangerous hodgepodge of uncoordinated civil and military operation and when the onrushing jet age was threatening to make deadly confusion on the nation's airways. He began by instituting a new program of cooperative military-civilian control of airspace, then set out to tighten civilian air-safety practices and bring them up to military standards. He sent his inspectors through a demanding Air Force check-out course in the KC-135 (the military version of the Boeing 707), and took the course himself (he is qualified to fly all jet types including fighters).

"Now," he says, "the FAA inspectors can fly these jets better than the man they're checking out." One out of four pilots, in fact, fails the FAA flight test on commercial jets first time around, and it was because the ratio was higher among pilots 55 and older that Quesada a few weeks ago made 60 the mandatory retirement age—and thus once more incurred the anger of most oldtime airline flyers, who had looked for retirement at 65.