Business: General of the Airways

ELWOOD RICHARD QUESADA

NEXT to the jet engine, perhaps the most powerful and quick-moving influence on U.S.

aviation today is a onetime fighter pi lot named Elwood Richard Quesada. As the first administrator of the new Federal Aviation Agency, “Pete” Quesada has the tough task of ensuring the safety of the na tion’s 93,900 aircraft and millions of passengers as the U.S. slams into the jet age with the speed— and potential hazard—of a .45-cal. bullet. Last week, after buzzing Senators for weeks, Pete Quesada won a major victory. The Sen ate restored $48.8 million of the $76 million cut by the House from FAA’s $587 million jet-age budget, bringing the total appropriation for operating expenses to within only $6,000,000 of what Quesada asked. Chances for the revised bill’s passage : excellent. The restoration gives Quesada virtually all he wanted, means that he will have the money to set up air controls, hire the men to man radar stations.

A sturdily built man with curly, close-cropped hair and a smile that flashes like a beacon light, Quesada, 55, inherited his Spanish father’s dark good looks and his Irish mother’s charm and temper. He can be blunt or suave—but in either case he is likely to know what he is talking about. A pilot since he was 20, he has flown every type of Air Force plane, has been checked out to pilot the huge KC-135 jet tanker. Quesada wields more power than any U.S. air administrator before him: all the duties of the old Civil Aeronautics Administration, plus the safety-rule-making powers once held by the Civil Aeronautics Board.

He needs all of it if he is to replace the obsolete U.S. air-traffic control system with a new one able to safely handle both jets and prop planes.

FIVE years ahead of schedule, Quesada has set up radar-controlled jet expressways from New York to Califor nia and from Florida to Gander by persuading the Air Force to let FAA men use its radar facilities. He has worked out a common airspace system for both military and commercial planes, opened thousands of square miles of “restricted” military space to commercial carriers. He prefers to use soft talk instead of a big stick, but he can hit hard, especially when pilots fail to realize that jet planes require a much closer watch than older, slower planes.

After he discovered that the captain was out of the cockpit talking to passengers in the cabin when a Pan American Boeing 707 dived 29,000 ft. on a transatlantic flight (TIME, Feb. 16), Old Pilot Quesada fined both Pan Am and the captain. He followed that up by publicly warning the Air Line Pilots Association that pilots are to stay in their cockpits with their belts fastened instead of gladhanding with the public. When the ALPA attacked this enforcement as a “childish Gestapo program,” Quesada fired back a blunt answer: Obey the rules or take the matter to court. Last week Quesada tightened up more. He took steps to ban commercial pilots over 55 from flying jet planes in the future, ground pilots 60 or older.

ALONG with the trust of the White House (he talks to President Eisenhower almost every day), Quesada has won the respect of almost everyone in Washington. When the House cut FAA’s budget, he did not blame Congressmen, instead admitted: “I failed personally in not being able to convince the subcommittee of the urgency of our needs.” Returning to the Hill, he turned on all burners—and his very best charm—and won the day.

Pete Quesada got into aviation in 1924, when he left Georgetown University to join the Army Air Service, moved slowly up through the ranks until World War II, when he became a major general. He distinguished himself as a combat commander in Europe and Africa, personally flew General Eisenhower over the D-day beachhead. Later he commanded the joint task force in the first H-bomb tests at Eniwetok. Atoll in 1951. After a brief hitch as head of Lockheed Aircraft’s missile division, he returned to Washington.

A gay bachelor until 42, Quesada married Mrs. Kate Pulitzer Putman, daughter of the late St. Louis Post-Dispatch Publisher Joseph Pulitzer, in 1946, now has four children. For relaxation, he plays golf (handicap: 9) or tennis. But most of his time is spent in his office on the third floor of a converted hospital across from Washington’s Corcoran Art Gallery, where he logs twelve hours a day. He works standing up, telephone to his ear, or prowls back and forth between his desk and work table. His friends insist that he tries to do too much himself, but General Quesada sees no help for it.

“We’re not just patching up an old system,” he says. “This is a whole new system—and we’ve just started on it.”