AOPA Pilot Magazine - March 2008 - 123

Fire in the hole! Aerojet General Corp. (the General Tire company) offered in 1958 the Aerojet 15NS 250 (250 pounds of thrust) Junior JATO aircraft rocket engine. Two of these supplementary booster rockets were mounted to the airframe to rescue you from a variety of predicaments. Need to escape wind shift on takeoff? Fire the rockets. Got a nasty downdraft while en route? Fire in the hole! Need to abort a landing? Light up those bad boys. By the time production stopped in the early 1960s, 790 had been sold, but by then more powerful aircraft engines were available and rockets were unnecessary, an Aerojet engineer said. Good thing, because pilots were not trained to adjust for the center of thrust shift caused after the rockets fired. Once the switch was thrown, the pilot became a test pilot. The former head of the Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA) James T. Pyle (top). The CAA was replaced by the Federal Aviation Agency and ﬁnally by the Federal Aviation Administration. The CAA sign comes down on headquarters on Independence Avenue in Washington, D.C. (above). Ancient bureaucrats There were bureaucrats in 1958, just like now. But there were no Department of Transportation (DOT) ofﬁcials, because there was no DOT until 1967. There were no FAA ofﬁcials because the Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA) still ruled the skies. The Federal Aviation Act was passed later in 1958 and created the FAA, but the CAA remained in place until 1959. The acronym FAA stood for Federal Aviation Agency, not Federal Aviation Administration. A photo showing removal of the former Civil Aeronautics Administration sign and replacement with the Federal Aviation Agency sign (new agency, but in the same building with nearly the same people) appeared in The AOPA Pilot in 1959. If you think the former age-60 retirement rule for airline pilots was as old as the FAA, you are correct. The former head of the CAA, James T. Pyle, brought the idea with him as the first deputy administrator of the FAA and enacted it soon after assuming his position. The FAA was formed under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a certificated pilot, after three midair collisions shook the public’s faith in the CAA. E-mail the author at alton.marsh@ aopa.org. AOPA PILOT • 123 • MARCH 2008 In the first issue of The AOPA Pilot, the Roscoe Turner Aeronautical Corporation advertised the Turner-Wright 230c radio, an 11-pound transceiver that covered 180 channels from 118 to 135.9 MHz. Someone named Buford Cadle offered this entirely unsolicited endorsement: “I am writing this testimonial entirely unsolicited,” he said. “After four years of experimental work we now have a trouble-free piece of equipment that will satisfy the most discriminate users.” And, folks, that was entirely unsolicited. The Roscoe Turner Aeronautical Corporation was better known for the formation of an airline and the offering of aviation services than for avionics, and the Combs Gates chain of FBOs purchased it in the late 1960s on the recommendation of Harry Combs. Combs was still independent in 1958 when he advertised in the ﬁrst issue of The AOPA Pilot under “Combs Aircraft” as being willing to “pay top dollar for a clean, well-maintained airplane.”

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AOPA Pilot Magazine - March 2008

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