The Bird Watcher

(See Cover) To fly without feathers is not easy.

-- Plautus (254?-184 B.C.) In his exalted soaring into the unforgiving air, man in his bird has reaped all the riches he ever dreamed of -- the poetry of flight itself and the victory over time and space. But in the swift tumble of progress called the Air Age, he has wrought more hard truth than poetry. The truth: the skies over the U.S. -- busiest of all air borne nations -- are roaring with an astonishing complex of featherless birds. Not counting 22,000 military aircraft, there are operating in the U.S. no fewer than 72,000 planes, ranging from lightweight, single-engined private craft to 295,000-lb., jet-driven, kerosene-guzzling monsters. A dozen planes take off and land every minute at the 567 U.S. airports that the air lines serve; and these airlines alone carry 152,300 passengers more than 2,200,000 miles a day.

The air they inhabit is a bulging bundle of nerves, a webwork of highways that crisscross for 220,000 miles in all directions, including ever-higher altitudes. Moreover, the dawn of the commercial jet age -- with 94 jet transports already in U.S. airline service, and about 150 more due by year's end -- with its near sonic speeds and bigger loads, has compounded all of the vast problems of the Air Age with unparalleled force.

Clear Space. The enormous cocoon of safety with which the U.S. has wrapped the Air Age is as complex as the problems of flight itself. Hunched over green-glowing radarscopes in 35 stations across the nation stand ARTC (Air Route Traffic Control) men, who follow and guide airplanes flying through heavy weather or at sky-streaking altitudes on Instrument Flight Rules. Moving their transparent markers ("shrimp boats") alongside little blips, they warn of nearby traffic, give directions, order changes in headings and altitudes. If a plane is a 550-m.p.h. jet, the controller gives the pilot 100 miles' clear space ahead, 100 behind; prop-driven planes get 35 miles. Through controllers and towers, miles of Teletype wire and a host of electronic machines, schedules are juggled, flights shifted, with split-second decision and never-ending attention to detail.

In the cockpits are more of the wrappings of the cocoon: rigorously trained pilots with computers for brains and steel for nerves, whose proficiency is checked by the clock and whose mistakes--even minor ones--are costly. The planes they fly are machines of infinite precision, built and maintained and double-checked constantly to assure mastery of the laws of physics.

Power. The only measure of success in the air, for people and for airborne industry, is the quality of that wondrously complicated envelope of safety, and the first responsibility for that safety rests in the hands of an organization that, for power and procedure, has no parallel in the U.S. It is the Federal Aviation Agency, and the man who rules it is a temperamental, mail-fisted, blunt-talking ex-fighter pilot named Elwood Ricardo Gonzalo Quesada.

"Pete" Quesada's 34,000-men FAA makes and enforces the rules and sets the safety standards for everything dealing with civil air in the nation (and at 414 U.S.-controlled stations abroad). Its authority reaches from design and construction of aircraft and components--down to the seats, lap belts and ashtrays--to ground maintenance, straight through to pilot and crew competency, aircraft operation, and the whole interlocking circuitry of air-traffic control.

Fellow with a Fuse. No other federal agency chief wields as much power as Quesada (or causes as much furor). Every morning he barges out of his rented town house on California Street in northwest Washington carrying the last night's bundle of homework, hops into the rear seat of a chauffeured, telephone-equipped Government Lincoln and heads down the avenue. In his cherry-plywood-paneled office, he pulls off his jacket and goes to work standing up. Pacing the floor, he rattles his points over the phone (President Eisenhower is "Sir," everybody else "Fellow"), dictates a blistering letter, or officiates at a staff meeting.

When he lunches at his desk, his wife, Kate Davis Pulitzer Putnam (widow of a World War II flyer, sister of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's Editor-Publisher Joseph Pulitzer Jr.), sends his food over by messenger. His easy smile, his compact, 183-Ib. frame and close-cropped, curly hair help him when he wants to be charming--and his short-fused temper is almost legendary. "Pete wants to hear a clear and specific answer, or 'Yes,' 'No,' or 'Maybe,' " says one staffer. "God help anybody who starts to answer Quesada with a speech in explanation for having goofed off. His bawlings-out are fierce. He's no brilliant guy, but what he does have is a helluva sense of duty and principle in public service." "

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.

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.

The Boat Will Rock. The son of a Spanish father and a mother of Irish extraction, Pete Quesada was born in Washington, D.C. 55 years ago. His father's family have long been private bankers in Madrid, and Pete's father himself was an expert on currency engraving for the U.S. Treasury Department. Despite the family's connections in high finance, young Quesada had no dreams of becoming a dollar scion. He flitted from school to school--Wyoming Seminary (Methodist) in Kingston, Pa., the University of Maryland, Georgetown University--played topflight tennis and some football, and did little else. He sold Crackerjack at Griffith Stadium, spent many a summer as a lifeguard in the Tidal Basin Pond near the Washington Monument.

One day in 1924, as he drifted in his lifeguard's rowboat, a playful swimmer reached up and began rocking the boat. Quesada's response was strikingly similar to his techniques even today: he raised an oar and whacked the swimmer on the hands. The victim was an Air Service pilot. The two made friends quickly, and soon thereafter the pilot took Quesada up for an airplane ride. That did it: the day after his first ride, Pete Quesada joined the Air Service, went off to training as a flying cadet. He became a first-class pilot.

Days of Adventure. Second Lieut. Quesada was a flying fool. After the hot-pilot fashion of the day, he barreled under most of the bridges between Washington and New York. He never missed a chance at extra flying duty, and he quickly amassed a reputation for being brash, undiplomatic and vain (there are many oldtime comrades who have found no reason to change that judgment).

Those were the days when aviators were known by the adventures they logged. When the German plane Bremen crash-landed off Labrador after its historic east-west Atlantic crossing in 1928, Quesada and a young captain named Ira Eaker flew north to help save the crew. At one point during that mission, Quesada got lost flying above the clouds. He began thinking "how marvelous it would be if there were some way to do airborne refueling on a continuous basis." Quesada later got Eaker to push his idea with high Air Corps brass. The result was the famous Question Mark flight of 1929, in which Quesada and future bannerline Air Force Generals Carl ("Tooey") Spaatz and Ira Eaker participated. Refueled by a second plane, Question Mark, an Army Fokker monoplane, stayed aloft for a record-breakin 6 1/2 days, and it made aviation history: in-flight refueling has long been an essential technique of the U.S. Air Force.

How to Start an Engine. As captain, Quesada had been on assignment as adviser to the Argentine Air Force for close to three years when he was ordered back to the States in late 1940. On his own, he took off in an old Grumman amphibian that the U.S. Navy wanted returned to the country. Laden with five 5-gal.gas cans, a pair of pliers, a tire casing and some safety wire, Quesada chugged along having himself a fine time. He fished in the lake region of Argentina, threaded through the Andes ("with the Christ of the Andes above my head"). One day he set the plane down in the ocean about 50 miles off the coast of Ecuador ("I got very thirsty"). But when he tried to handcrank his engine for a takeoff, the inertial starter clutch failed. "There I was," he says, "drifting to Honolulu. I cranked myself to exhaustion." After long minutes of finger drumming, Quesada suddenly recalled an old aviator's superstition. He went back and urinated on the tail. Naturally, the engine started up with the next turn of the crank.

Notwithstanding his brash independence, Quesada ably fulfilled his jobs in the demanding years that followed. He was commanding general, Twelfth Fighter Command in Africa, deputy commander Northwest African Coastal Air Force, and before D-day took over the Ninth Fighter Command. On D-day plus one, Quesada landed his own P-38 fighter plane on the Normandy beach ("My first step was not on European soil--it was on a dead German").

Right Flank March. A month later, he put Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower piggyback in the cockpit of a P-51 and took him on a go-minute ride along the beachhead ("Eisenhower was very pleased, but we both caught hell from the Joint Chiefs of Staff"). During the great armored-tank drive across Europe, Quesada's Ninth Tactical Air Command, rather than troops, became Lieut. General George Patton's "right flank": he had put a fighter pilot in each of Patton's lead tanks "so that we would have quick communications with fighter pilots. I wanted somebody in those tanks who could talk fighter pilot lingo." Quesada chalked up 90 combat missions before war's end, went home with the Distinguished Service Medal, Air Medal with two Silver Oak Leaf Clusters, Distinguished Flying Cross, etc., and a drawerful of assorted foreign decorations. He also went home with his facility for the flippant still intact. Once he landed his 6-26 onto an icy airstrip at Long Island's Mitchel Field, skidded the length of the runway, up an embankment, across a busy highway, through a steel fence, stopped at last on the polo field of the Meadowbrook Club, got out and asked: "Where are the horses?" He served for close to three years as commander of the Tactical Air Command, and in 1949-51 was top military commander of the crucial Operation Greenhouse, in which the U.S. exploded the first hydrogen bomb at Eniwetok. In 1951, at age 47, Lieut. General Quesada retired. He worked for a while at California's Lockheed Aircraft Corp. (vice president of the missile-systems division), but quit in a row over policy. When Ike called him to Washington, Quesada was dabbling successfully in investments with space-age inventors.

Regulating the Regulations. His no-nonsense attitude about the job was loudly evident from the start of Quesada's service with FAA. Right off, he told a black-tie dinner at the National Aviation Club in Washington about his plans for the Air Age and his awareness of the dangers. "There is a lot to learn in Washington about cannibals," he informed a big audience packed with Congressmen, Senators and blue-ribbon aviation-industry executives, "but I don't intend to be chewed . . . I don't intend to get caught in Washington like the girl with the Gleem in her eye."*

Pete Quesada moved too fast to get caught. The biggest barrier to positive federal control of aviation, he found, was bureaucratic inertia, in which "the regulator was regulating to meet the needs of the regulated, and without due regard to the needs of the public." He solved that with a personnel shakedown and then began his massive attack. In quick time, Quesada:

P: Arranged for a coordinated military-civilian air-traffic-control setup with the help of military's $2 billion radar network, within a few months established complete ground radar control on all major high-altitude routes in the U.S.

P: Got an agreement from Air Force Vice Chief of Staff Curt LeMay that permits FAA civilian flight inspectors to take the Strategic Air Force's big-plane jet training at Castle AFB in California. Result: 14 have become qualified, a dozen more are in training. (Quesada himself has been checked out in the Air Force's KC-135, military version of the 707; on business flights, however, he usually pilots one of FAA's T-33 jets or borrows a fighter from the Air Force or the Navy.)

P: Wangled thousands of miles of "restricted" airspace from the military to provide more room for commercial traffic.

P: Set up a reorganized National Aviation Facilities Experimental Center (NAFEC) in Atlantic City, N.J., where FAA scientists develop and test new control and safety systems.

P: Appropriated, after a bitter dispute--which President Eisenhower himself settled in Quesada's favor--five radio frequencies from the Air Force and industry, for use in new navigational systems now being designed at NAFEC.

Going Like 60. With all this welcome overhaul for the safety cocoon, the airlines and pilots still find plenty to squawk about. Pilots charge that FAA inspectors are harassing them. Indeed, the inspectors, backed heartily by Quesada, seem to materialize in cockpits like eager gremlins, ready to slap a fine on a pilot for the slightest infraction of the rule book. With each infraction, Quesada gets tougher. After a Pan American Boeing 707 started into a near fatal dive while its pilot was back chinning with the passengers, Quesada enforced a long-disregarded regulation requiring all pilots to stay in their cockpits except for good and sufficient reason.

Quesada has also been hotly accused of being unnecessarily arbitrary and of failing to consult with the industry before he gavels out his dicta. Recently, he ordered airlines to install weather radar in all planes, had to back down and make an exception of obsolescent planes when some lines raised a ruckus. The Air Line Pilots Association, the exclusive A.F.L.-C.I.O. union (membership: 14,000) led by Militant Pilot Clarence Sayen, is Quesada's most vociferous critic. A.L.P.A.'s latest complaint: Quesada's new ruling requiring mandatory retirement of all transport pilots at 60. The union is bringing court action against Quesada for that.

Command Decision. Another recent incident that blew up a storm occurred last month, when a National Airlines pilot was rolling his 707 down a Miami runway. Suddenly one engine flamed out. Though the plane was within three or four knots of critical takeoff speed and thus technically should have aborted, it looked to the pilot as if such action would almost certainly lead to a crackup. Making his decision in an instant, the National pilot kept going, lifted the plane off the ground, circled around and landed safely. Still, an accompanying FAA flight inspector filed a complaint against the pilot for rule-book infringement. Though A.L.P.A. Boss Sayen hammered away at FAA's rigid judgment, Quesada had the last word: investigation showed that the pilot had failed to safety-catch a fuel-flow lever; it had slipped out of position to cut off the fuel to one engine on takeoff. The FAA rules on fuel-flow levers were tightened.

In spite of the noisy complaints by union brass, airline pilots, splendidly skilled and incessantly trained in their trade, realize and accept the necessity for top safety standards and sharp enforcement. While they are helpless to prevent demented passengers from lugging explosives aboard their planes, they remember too well the score of near misses in the air and the ballooning number of fatal crashes. The airlines carried 380 million passengers in the past ten years, and killed only 1,300. But the U.S. death toll alone since January 1958 is an alarming 378.

Chickens & Golf Balls. In the face of all the hazards, FAA, overall, is doing a first-rate job. Mechanically, the job is overwhelming. FAA alone has 41 volumes on rules and procedures, and airline-maintenance libraries run along yards of shelf space; there are even manuals on how to read other manuals. Research experts, for example, test windshields by shooting 4-lb. dead chickens at the cockpit (birds in flight are a big and dangerous nuisance), check jet engines for durability by lobbing golf balls into the intakes.

For the modern pilot, the stresses are just as great. He must absorb hundreds of rules and procedures, study graphs, maps and reports, even occasionally take off his jet on downwind runways because airport operators prefer him to fly over open areas and avoid householders' complaints about noise. A pilot has to be able to make as many as 100 visual "fixes" per minute on his instrument panel during his busiest moments--the landing approach. He must take extra precautions to keep his health during a long flight; pilots and copilots take their meals at alternate times; American Airlines forbids crews to eat seafood because of its perishability.

By the Numbers. For the jet pilot, moreover, the art of flying has become a science: he flies not by feel but by his instruments and the standard procedure. Looking into cloudless skies at high altitudes, his eyes focus only 3 1/2 ft. away; he cannot tell whether his engines are running or whether his wingtips are flat with the horizon--unless he looks at the huge instrument panel. The jet transport is flown, says one 707 pilot, "by the numbers --the instrument numbers." The captain needs two additional qualified pilots in the cockpit to help him, and the air crew's computations in a vast assortment of critical areas must be as unfailing as a heartbeat.

Fortunately, all U.S. airlines have a mutual agreement to keep their planes on Instrument Flight Rules. And since all I.F.R. flights are automatically controlled by Pete Quesada's growing string of Air Route Traffic Control Centers, pilots have an additional safety premium.

Somebody Up There. As good as this seeing-eye system is, Pete Quesada and FAA researchers are out to make it better. Already in the works is an automated, electronic-brain system into which all I.F.R. flight plans will be fed. Geared through a memory phase, a flight plan filed in New York would instantly turn up all other flight plans around the nation that contain conflicting data in time and place. NAFEC in Atlantic City is also working on better runway lighting and approach systems (pilots claim that the dark-blue taxiway lights depress them), a weather-reporting scheme measured on the runways (a must for critically loaded jets), better communications systems.

Explains one FAA official: "We do not want to control all flying. We want the capability of complete surveillance so we can see everything in the skies and spot potential traffic dangers." Although there is a prospect that the actual number of big planes will diminish in years ahead--military aviation will be reduced by missiles, the commercial fleet perhaps by bigger, faster, quick-turn-around jets--the problems of air traffic and safety will become even more complex. The number of private planes--70,000 in the U.S. alone --is increasing steadily, and once FAA has the higher altitudes under complete control, it will have to do something about those closer to the ground.

As for today, the great achievements of FAA's boss are proof enough that matters are well managed, after years of slow deterioration in the government-civilian flying agencies. Glancing skyward at the featherless creatures that fleck the clouds, the U.S. public senses a new confidence: somebody, flying around up there, likes them.

His name is Pete Quesada.

-- Who was brushing her teeth with Gleem when she was surprised, as it were, from behind.

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