Word: quesada
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...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...
...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...
...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...