Word: pilots
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
...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...
...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...
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...