CHAPTER SEVEN
The Politics of Blind Landing
In May 1947, Charles V. Murray told readers of Life magazine that the Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA) had “declined into a mental outlook more befitting the guild of harness-makers.” At issue was CAA’s continued insistence on deploying its “old-fashioned” instrument landing system (ILS), which differed from the army’s wartime SCS-51 only in that it was housed in buildings instead of in a truck, and not the army/navy AN/MPN-1 ground-controlled approach (GCA) system. GCA’s glories had been trumpeted throughout the U.S. aviation press as the best solution—and by Aviation News and AOPA Pilot as the only solution—to that now-ancient bugaboo of fliers, the blind landing.1 Criticism of CAA’s “anti-radar” policy began in late 1945, almost immediately after cessation of hostilities, and became increasingly vitriolic throughout 1946. The August 1946 decision of the Collier Trophy Committee, custodians of the most prestigious aviation honor, to present the 1945 award for “the greatest achievement in aviation in America” to Luis Alvarez was merely one more blow to CAA’s credibility. Over the next few months, Congress joined the media criticism and launched an investigation into air safety.2
Part of the controversy descended from the landing aids decisions made by the U.S. Army Air Forces (AAF) and the U.S. Navy. The navy had decided by late 1945 to abandon SCS-51/ILS completely in favor of AN/MPN-1/GCA, while the AAF publicly promoted GCA.3 Nonetheless, the AAF continued to install both mobile SCS-51s and fixed ILS stations throughout the United States and along overseas routes. The majority of its GCA sets, moreover, stayed in storage despite its own rhetoric. Manpower shortages kept the army from utilizing the GCA sets it possessed, regardless of policy decisions. The AAF had chosen not to choose, in essence.
The aeronautical press bore a bias at least as deep as the one it attributed to CAA. It took at face value the words of GCA enthusiasts, even when their “facts” were somewhat questionable. The historian will search in vain through the pages of Aviation News, for example, for a single positive mention of ILS, despite its solid war record. Instead, one will find page after page devoted to reporting on the number of airmen “saved” by GCA. Only by referring to the National Archives can one discover that there were more than twice as many ILS systems in successful operation at military airfields in the United States in 1946 as GCA sets. Biased reporting created much heat but shed little light on significant issues.
The CAA’s administrator in the first post–World War II years was Theodore P. Wright, a well-respected aeronautical engineer. Appointed in August 1944, he replaced Charles Stanton, who then became assistant administrator. Wright had come to Roosevelt’s attention through his service as a member of the Aircraft Production Board, where he had earned a reputation for working well with the military. He also had foreign contacts and was a member of the Royal Aeronautical Society, which President Roosevelt had hoped would better enable him to work with the new Provisional International Civil Aviation Organization. Wright was also a believer in what Joseph Corn has called the “winged gospel,” and he wrestled with the inconsistency between his interest in private aviation and his duty to the primary users of the airways, whom he felt were commercial and military fliers.4 As a result, he spent most of his term being attacked by the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association for not doing enough to help the “little man” gain access to the airways. The ILS/GCA debate is one place where Wright most spectacularly failed private fliers.
The issue of access to the skies is a deeply political one. Both GCA and ILS worked as effective landing aids, but how they worked—not how well—caused private and some military fliers to line up in the GCA camp, while the Air Line Pilots Association and most airlines supported the CAA and its ILS. In short, GCA was easier and cheaper for an “average” pilot to use, which is precisely why airline pilots were opposed to it. GCA enthusiasts saw it as a way to promote a democratic vision of aviation, one in which every adult could own and operate an airplane. The Air Line Pilots Association, by contrast, saw it as a threat to pilot autonomy and a means of deskilling the profession. Ultimately, however, the outcome of the controversy was determined by how the two systems allocated costs.
The great debate over ILS and GCA took place in the aeronautical and mainstream media between December 1945 and the end of 1947, and in a congressional investigation into aviation safety which ran from January to March 1947.5 The media universally took the pro-GCA position, granting no quarter to ILS supporters, all of whom were painted as “conservatives” refusing to adopt or even seriously consider new technologies, particularly radar. The leading GCA supporters were J. B. Hartranft Jr., head of the private-aviation-oriented Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA) and editor of its newsletter, AOPA Pilot; and an aviation writer named William Kroger, who wrote primarily for the magazine Aviation News. The defenders of ILS were CAA’s “old guard,” led by Charles Stanton and the president of the Air Line Pilots Association, David Behncke.
A cartoon appearing in AOPA Pilot in June 1946 illustrates the participants and their positions in this rather complex process, at least from Hartranft’s perspective (Figure 7.1). The man in the flight suit represents private fliers (and by implication, all fliers, as no ALPA character appears), while the “fat cat” businessman next to him represents the CAA. The absence of a figure for the Air Transport Association (ATA) implies that the CAA figure represented both the agency and its preferred client, ATA. CAA’s officials were hardly well paid; Wright’s salary went up when he left the administrator’s office for Cornell University. Clearly, AOPA considered CAA biased toward business and combined CAA and ATA into a single figure.
The cartoon also accurately represents the positions of the armed services. A navy officer seeks to help convince the reluctant agency that GCA was the right choice. The navy had adopted GCA for several reasons. First, the ILS was unusable aboard aircraft carriers, as the beam required a stable reflecting surface. Second, the navy had always used a form of “ground-controlled approach” aboard aircraft carriers. A safety petty officer guided aircraft aboard using light wands and hand signals, so that Alvarez’s GCA was merely an extension of its existing operating procedures. Third, as the navy’s head of aircraft research told an interviewer, GCA was cheaper from the navy’s point of view. Admiral Luis de Florez explained that while the GCA ground installation cost twice as much as ILS, the cost of the onboard ILS receivers greatly outweighed the ILS ground installation’s lower cost. But the real savings from GCA came from reduced training costs. ILS required training thousands of pilots and, since skills atrophied when they went unused, necessitated recurrent training every few months. GCA had no pilot training costs, only operator costs. Hundreds of pilots might use a GCA installation in the course of a day, but a new two-man GCA being developed would need only eight operators and one maintenance technician to serve them round the clock.6 From the navy’s point of view, GCA was an economical choice.
Figure 7.1. “Only GCA can save us!” The Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association’s view of the ILS/GCA conflict. AOPA Pilot, June 1946, 52a. Courtesy of Hagley Museum and Library.
While the navy’s position in the conflict was unambiguous, the cartoon makes clear that the Air Force’s was not. The agency’s leadership refused to take a public position on the issue, arguing instead that the two systems should be seen as complementary, not as rivals. This reflected internal arguments over the two systems’ relative merits. In 1945, the AAF’s chief instrument instructor pilot, Lt. Col. J. B. Duckworth, had argued that neither system was completely suitable and recommended further development. The agency then ran a series of tests during 1946 on the two systems at the Civil Aeronautics Administration’s Indianapolis center which resulted in a similar set of recommendations. In its review of those tests, the Air University, which was charged with professional education of Air Force officers, argued that GCA, while it had put in a better showing during the test series, was problematic because it violated the principle of “air leadership” by placing control of aircraft in ground controllers’ hands—precisely the pilots union’s argument. It also recognized that ILS required greater levels of training, was more difficult to fly, and depended on special equipment in the aircraft. The Air Force’s leadership ultimately decided that it wanted a fully automated system that allowed pilots to decide whether to use it or not; until it developed that system, it supported installing both ILS and GCA.7
Two major players are missing from the cartoon. The lack of representation for ALPA, the commercial pilots union, suggests that AOPA did not wish to reveal division among pilots over the two systems. It may also indicate that AOPA considered ALPA illegitimate. The two organizations rarely saw eye to eye, with the union consistently fighting for tighter regulation of the industry, while AOPA preferred a laissez-faire approach. AOPA may have felt that commercial pilots did not deserve separate representation. The other missing party, of course, is the U.S. Congress. That omission is forgivable. No one could have foreseen the political attention that the great ILS/GCA controversy eventually drew, but perhaps someone should have. Ultimately, the choice between the two systems was a political one, and thus well within that body’s traditional rights.
If I have accurately represented the positions of the groups involved in the blind landing controversy, no single issue dominated the debate. Commercial pilots perceived in GCA a threat to their professional autonomy, and private pilots saw it as a means to safer (and less expensive) personal flying.8 Autonomy was never an issue for navy pilots.9 Cost was that agency’s major concern. And autonomy was just one of several issues for the Air Force, while cost appears to have been irrelevant. Different issues mattered to different organizations.
The great controversy began inauspiciously, in routine meetings of the Interagency Air Traffic Control Board, which had been formed to standardize approach procedures for airfields throughout the country. In meeting no. 359, held on October 25, 1944, the members voted to allow the installation of what the AAF referred to as the “instrument low approach” system without restriction.10 (The Army Air Forces had decided there was no such thing as an “instrument landing system,” and this was simply the army name for CAA’s fixed ILS installations.) Before that action, each installation had to be individually reviewed and approved, slowing installation work. Production problems that had slowed the CAA-AAF program to install fixed ILS stations during the war had been overcome, and the army had finally begun providing CAA with complete sets of ground equipment, including the AAF’s straight-line glide path. Because many of the installations were being made at commercial airfields that had been taken over by the AAF at the onset of the war, CAA expected both fields and equipment to revert to commercial use very shortly after the end of the war. That would allow almost immediate availability of a standardized landing aid to its airline customers. The end of CAA’s decade-long quest to improve airline regularity appeared, finally, to be in sight.
A few months later, in May 1945, CAA’s bubble burst. The Interagency Air Traffic Control Board, which was dominated by the army and navy, reversed itself and proposed immediate cessation of all installations and commissionings of the instrument low approach systems, “until a standardization policy applicable to all systems could be established.” On the record the reason given for this change in policy was to resolve some conflicts over frequency allocations and flight pattern interferences between adjacent stations. The internal CAA memo reports, however, that the real reason for the sudden reversal of the earlier decision was “that an important segment of military opinion favors discontinuance of the Instrument Approach Program by the Army and proceeding with installations of Ground Controlled Approach Systems of the radar type.”11 CAA’s representative arrived at this conclusion after an informal conversation with Lt. Col. Clarence B. Sproul, the senior Army Air Force member. CAA’s representatives strongly opposed the recommendation, of course. They pointed out that CAA’s system was standardized, according to previous agreements established years earlier. It was congressionally approved and funded, which, they insisted, made carrying out the program mandatory. CAA was able to block final approval of the new policy, but its representatives recognized their organization suddenly faced a real problem.
The ground-controlled approach system was not unknown to CAA, although it was certainly unfamiliar to many of its personnel. Thomas Bourne, the director of Federal Airways, had accidentally been invited to the official tests that the MIT Radiation Lab had held at National Airport in February 1943. He had been required to sign papers barring him from discussing it, even within CAA, but by 1944, GCA was an open secret within the organization. Except for that early test series, however, no one else in the organization had seen it or operated it, let alone learned its details of operation and maintenance procedures. Regardless of the system’s performance, CAA was not prepared to operate it in February 1945.
During the controversy, accusations flew regarding who knew what, and when, with ground controlled approach partisans attempting to depict CAA as incompetently slow even to try the system. Thomas Bourne was attacked because he had known about GCA since early 1943 but had not done anything about it, despite the wraps of secrecy around the system through late 1944.12 Bourne did not help matters any by claiming that he was unaware of GCA before February 1945, which was actually the date CAA was first allowed to send staff to train on and evaluate a GCA installation. Aviation News also reported Maj. Gen. Harold McClelland’s claim that he had offered Bourne a GCA set during the fall of 1944 but had been refused, to further paint Bourne into the “old guard” anti-GCA camp. The record, however, shows that McClelland had offered to let CAA evaluate a GCA set in November and that Bourne had accepted it the following month. Those tests were scheduled for February at Bryan; that same February Bourne also formally requested that the Army Air Forces loan a GCA set to CAA for more extensive tests and to serve as the basis for drafting specifications for a civil version.13 Bourne also met with the president of Gilfillan Brothers, the army’s ground controlled approach manufacturer, and Homer Tasker, Gilfillan’s GCA project engineer, in February to arrange technical training and maintenance assistance. The requested unit arrived in May at the Indianapolis Experiment Station, still nominally an AAF-run facility. Kroger, the leading GCA partisan among the aviation writers of the day, later summarized this exchange in an “objective” history of the controversy, which consistently portrayed McClelland’s claims as the true version of events.14
The record seems to show that CAA moved as quickly as one can expect of a large bureaucracy, especially given its almost complete isolation from the vast array of new aviation technologies developed during the war. As agency historian John Wilson has pointed out, CAA had started the war ten years ahead of the AAF in navigation technologies and ended it ten years behind. That was hardly the agency’s fault. All of the new technologies were secret and, once unveiled, took time to learn. They also required money, and CAA’s budget for radio and radar research was a mere $87,000 for FY1946, and $180,000 for FY1947, which Ben Stern, the assistant administrator for public affairs, told the editor of the Chicago Times was one-fifth what the agency had requested.15 The amount was not enough to buy a set of any type of radar, and CAA was therefore entirely dependent on handouts from the Pentagon for its investigations. It obtained its first radar gear from the navy, which sent ten truckloads of various sorts of equipment in late 1944 to the Indianapolis Experiment Station. That delivery is what had prompted Bourne to try to obtain a GCA set, which the navy had not included in its bequest.
Glen Gilbert, chief of CAA’s Air Traffic Control Division, conducted the agency’s first evaluation of GCA during February 1945 at the Army Air Force’s Instrument Instructor School at Bryan, Texas. Gilbert had been one of the first group of controllers hired by CAA to run its first experimental “en route” air traffic control center, which went into operation in 1936.16 His analysis was certainly biased by his job assignment, and he reported primarily on GCA’s utility as a traffic control aid.
Gilbert described discussions he had held with various staff members at the Instrument Instructor School. According to his report, they believed that because the final controller could handle only one aircraft at a time, the maximum landing rate for GCA was one plane every two minutes, based on the two-mile range of the precision radars. Additional precision scopes and an extra controller could raise this capacity to one per minute, which “was just about the capacity of a single runway under any weather conditions.” By contrast, the instructors thought that SCS-51 could only handle one aircraft every three minutes, due to beam deflections caused by other aircraft. Although this appeared to give advantage to GCA, both CAA and AAF found that the two-mile approach the AN/MPN-1 offered was too short for the largest aircraft and increased the precision radars’ range to six miles, and then to ten miles, reversing the capacity advantage.17 In actuality, the capacity issue was never subject to public controversy, and throughout 1945 and 1946 both CAA and AAF sought to find ways to increase the safe capacity of both systems.
More important was Gilbert’s evaluation of the ease of use of the two systems: “Based on discussions with officers who have had considerable experience in both systems, and considering my personal reaction in making consecutive approaches under the hood (SCS-51 in an AT-6 and GCA in a B-24), it is the writer’s personal opinion that making instrument approaches under GCA will be easier for the average pilot than when using SCS-51.”18
Gilbert was seconded by A. H. Hadfield, the assistant chief of the Airways Engineering Division.19 This had, of course, been one of the system’s major selling points for the generals and admirals who had witnessed the official Radiation Lab demonstrations in February 1943. Alvarez had intended it to be easy for pilots, and Gilbert’s statement reiterates that original goal. It was also a prophetic statement, and the first warning to CAA’s old guard that they might face a public revolt.
By the end of the year, the two men found their opinions being echoed by members of the aeronautical press. William Kroger reported in December 1945 that “private flyers and segments of the industry [were] arranged against CAA, criticizing its instrument approach system as too complicated.” He blamed CAA’s conservative faction for continued promotion of ILS, and in subsequent articles various other Aviation News authors named Stanton and Bourne as the leaders of that faction. The Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association was the segment of the industry in question, as the Air Transport Association supported CAA’s ILS. The two exceptions were Pan Am (not represented by the Air Transport Association, since it served overseas routes exclusively), and Jack Frye’s TWA. Pan Am, along with a number of transatlantic airlines, rented a GCA set from the army and operated it at Gander, Newfoundland, beginning in January 1947. TWA did the same at Reading, Pennsylvania, as an emergency field for its major hub at Philadelphia. For that, the two received great accolades from Aviation News, Popular Science, and even the New York Times.20 Adm. Emory S. Land, president of the Air Transport Association, pushed CAA to make experimental GCA installations, yet Land and his technical vice-president, retired general Milton Arnold, emphasized GCA use as traffic control aid, not primarily as a landing aid. Hence, “segments of the industry” is at best a misleading phrase, and many aviation writers seem to have followed Kroger in misconstruing support for GCA as a control aid as support for it as a landing aid.
Although the aeronautical press castigated CAA for its “anti-radar” faction, it was clearly an unfair characterization. Administrator Wright wrote to James Johnson, president of the Springfield (Missouri) Flying Service, that the CAA program included “the adoption of ground radar search installations for use in connection with airport traffic control.”21 He did not, however, mention its use as a landing aid. That distinction was never made clear within the aeronautical press, and a large portion of the acrimony over radar was probably derived from sheer confusion. CAA’s policy was not anti-radar, but its officials by and large were opposed to its use as a landing aid.
Leaving aside the innate bias Bourne, Stanton, and others had toward ILS, the use of radar as a landing aid appeared to be a very bad deal to CAA. One problem it perceived was liability. If a pilot using ILS made a mistake and crashed, it was legally “pilot error” and therefore an airline responsibility. If the ILS were broken, aircraft could be sent elsewhere. If a GCA final controller made a mistake, then CAA clearly was responsible. Since pilots had no other source of information on their approach position in a GCA-only approach, they could not evaluate the controllers’ orders, and hence CAA could not pin the blame on them.
A larger problem for CAA was the sheer number of operators that a full-scale GCA deployment would have entailed. The wartime sets, as described in Chapter 6, required five operators per shift, with at least one additional maintenance person. CAA worked with Gilfillan Brothers during 1946 to reduce that to two operators per shift, but for twenty-four-hour operation that still required eight operators and two maintenance crew per installation. The agency planned to install ILS at 180 airports throughout the country by 1950, which would mean an additional 1,800 new employees if GCA replaced ILS in its plans. That was a 10 percent increase over CAA’s 1946 payroll. CAA was under no illusion that Congress would happily provide it with so many new payroll lines; indeed, the agency found Congress unwilling to provide sufficient payroll funds to bring it to its authorized manpower. Worse, Congress effectively cut CAA’s payroll in 1946, prompting the closure of fifty-five airways communications stations.22 Given its tight budget, it is unsurprising that CAA’s policy was to use radar sparingly. Since ILS was automated, and required only one maintenance person whose duties could be split between the ILS and other airport electronics gear, it made far more sense to officials.
Then there was the issue of maintenance costs. Although CAA had received and tested a GCA set during 1945, it did not undertake anything like the rigorous testing necessary to really evaluate the system’s performance or determine its true operating costs in civil use until 1946. Military cost estimates were essentially useless because military operations did not sufficiently resemble civil ones. With the exception of Military Air Transport Service operations, military aircraft took off and returned nearly simultaneously. That meant the system had to handle high volume, but only for short periods of time. The system could then be put in standby for several hours before the next wave of aircraft operations. Military operations did not require continuous availability, and maintenance could be scheduled between operating periods. Commercial use, by contrast, required continuous operation of the system for at least twelve and even, at the largest airfields, twenty-four hours a day. Maintenance time came only at the expense of service to aircraft, which meant commercial use required a vastly more reliable piece of equipment than the military needed.
CAA found during its investigations in 1946 that the Gilfillan-built AN/MPN-1 it had been loaned required 900 hours of maintenance for 1,600 hours of operation, although some of that maintenance could be conducted while the system was in operation. Gilfillan Brothers hotly contested that figure, but based on the Signal Corps’ own maintenance records for the twenty-eight GCA sets it operated during 1945 and 1946, it may have been accurate. There was extreme variability in the number of maintenance hours needed to keep the equipment running: some units spent more time being maintained than being operated, while others appear to have been very reliable.23 One likely explanation is poor quality control at the factory. With 600 vacuum tubes stuffed into a trailer, minor variations in placement, quality of soldered connections, and quality of components could cause large differences in reliability between units. CAA might have gotten a lemon. Another explanation is quality of maintenance personnel. Inexperienced or poorly trained maintenance people require much more time to accomplish a given task than someone who knows the equipment well, and CAA’s own lack of radar acumen no doubt drove up its tally of maintenance hours. Finally, the basic design of Gilfillan’s equipment seems to have affected its reliability. During the war, Bendix engineers sent to Gilfillan Brothers by the navy to learn how to build GCA had substantial disagreements over design with Gilfillan’s chief engineer; after the war, CAA found that Bendix-made GCA sets, known officially as AN/MPN-1(B), were easier to maintain and much more reliable.
Regardless of cause, CAA’s officials were convinced that the maintenance requirements of the wartime GCA sets were too great for civil use. They worked with Gilfillan to try to reduce those costs. The agency reported its efforts in CAA Journal throughout 1946 and 1947. Re-engineering GCA for commercial service meant, of course, several years of delay before any feasible implementation of either full GCA or even just the search radar. Engineering work required time and money, neither of which were granted to the besieged CAA.
Cost, however, depends on one’s point of view. As noted above, from the navy’s perspective GCA was less expensive. The only highly trained people required by the system were the ground controllers, and even a large-scale GCA installation would require fewer operators than there were pilots who, in an ILS world, would have to be extensively trained, and constantly retrained, in order to maintain their skills. “Under such circumstances,” Adm. Luis de Florez had stated, “GCA is incomparably cheaper ... The training you give the ground operators of GCA covers literally the hundreds of pilots a day he [sic] can talk in safely.”24
The admiral was most certainly correct, from a certain point of view. Eliminating a great mass of pilot training to train a much smaller group of controllers meant significant savings to the navy. For the CAA, however, which did not have to pay pilot training, the addition of controllers and increased training was a major budget blow. ILS minimized cost to the agency, at the price of raising the airlines’ costs. The airlines did not object, since they expected additional revenue from whatever landing aid was selected, and most were not thrilled with various cost-sharing proposals that were bandied about in Congress to fund GCA. Hence the different economics of commercial and military aviation influenced technological choice in a way that was never made clear in the media. GCA probably was cheaper from a global economic standpoint, but such a consideration was irrelevant to the CAA, the Budget Bureau, and to the Congress.
Therefore, CAA did indeed object to radar landing but not solely because of the conservatism of Stanton’s old guard. The agency believed it had legitimate concerns based on its funding history balanced against the costs it expected radar landing to impose over and above a much more limited traffic control radar deployment. The media’s own bias, however, prevented it from explaining the real costs of radar landing. In fact, the media often misrepresented the issue. AOPA Pilot, for example, told its readers that one GCA set could serve Washington National, Bolling Field, and Anacostia Naval Air Station.25 That, of course, was an absurd claim, but one the average person could not evaluate. Nor could the media advocates accept that re-engineering the wartime GCA was necessary to make it commercially useful, and they insisted that CAA adopt the trailer-mounted sets immediately.
Pressure thus built on Administrator Wright to do something about GCA during 1946, and he decided to try to obtain some additional GCA units to install at commercial fields in order to determine the true costs of operating them as commercial installations. He was probably persuaded to try this by Milton Arnold, an ex-brigadier general who had commanded a bomber group in Europe during the war and had left the army to become head of the Air Transport Association’s engineering section. Arnold had broached the issue of the Army Air Forces loaning three sets of AN/MPN-1 equipment to CAA as well, and the AAF’s internal response is worth repeating verbatim: “The primary purpose is to demonstrate conclusively to CAA the advantages of search radar in simplifying airport traffic control and at the same time improve airline schedules and operations during the coming winter. Early adoption of airport radar by the CAA will be advantageous to the AAF as well as the airlines, consequently this Headquarters [Air Materiel Command] concurs in the desirability of aiding in the project even to the extent of loaning developmental equipment.”26
Air Materiel Command’s letter suggests that neither the Air Transport Association nor the Army Air Forces was dedicated to forcing CAA to adopt GCA’s landing function. It clearly is aimed at GCA’s traffic control function, in the same way that Glen Gilbert of CAA’s Air Traffic Control Division had emphasized the search radar’s utility in his 1945 report. That traffic control was the important issue to the Air Transport Association’s leaders is unsurprising, despite the media’s devotion to radar landing. Its officials were well aware that if CAA suddenly dropped ILS for radar landing, widespread deployment would be several years away due to the vagaries of federal budgeting and the need to re-engineer the equipment. ILS was already installed at thirty-nine major commercial fields, and CAA had funding for a large number of smaller fields as well. The only reason it was not already operational was lack of receivers for the aircraft, and those too were expected in a few months. The ATA and its member airlines had been burned before by waiting for something “better” to be perfected when a “good enough” system already existed, and it was not about to make that mistake again. From the airlines’ point of view, radar landing was not worth waiting for.
However, the letter also implies that Air Materiel Command agreed with the aeronautical press that some elements within CAA were not giving GCA’s search function its due. Both Wright and Glen Gilbert, however, were already enthusiastic about GCA’s possibilities as a traffic control device. Agency poverty prevented them from doing much about it, although Wright did seek to have CAA’s radar research budget increased. The Budget Bureau also denied this request. So borrowing was all he really could do.
Wright happily accepted the Army Air Forces offer to loan three GCA sets for installation at Chicago, La Guardia, and Washington National after getting the Air Transport Association to agree to pay the installation cost (a not-inexpensive $20,000 per site) and arranging for Gilfillan Brothers to install three experimental remoting kits to place the radar screens in the airport control towers instead of in the trailer parked on the field. Those kits were also part of the AAF’s loan. Where the money for their installation came from is not clear in the records, but CAA had to pay the twenty-one operators necessary to run the three stations, borrowing people from other parts of its airways operation service to crew the units.27 The GCA sets did not come back from Gilfillan until late in the year and were not ready for service before January 1947.
Despite Wright’s efforts to overcome whatever bias existed within Stanton’s old guard, it was never enough to satisfy the GCA enthusiasm Kroger and other aviation writers promoted. He could not have satisfied it because he worked within constraints imposed on him by CAA’s position as a poorly funded subunit of the Commerce Department. His primary constituency, the commercial airlines, wanted a system of landing aids immediately, not years in the future, and ILS was all that was available. Radar landing, even if he had been able to reconcile its high cost with his comparatively small budget through some means of creative cost-sharing with the airlines, was years away from service if for no other reason than the time needed to re-engineer the equipment to reduce its maintenance and operator costs. During the war emergency, when cost was no object, GCA had taken a year and a half to get into production, and the aviation writers’ presumption that a civilianized, rigorously tested radar system could be had in mid-1946 was absurd. Ultimately, the GCA enthusiasts could not see that “combat proven” was not a good enough appellation for civil use. Civil aviation had different needs.
Yet CAA’s concerns about radar landing were not entirely legitimate, either. The budget problem CAA’s officials perceived was not really CAA’s problem at all. It belonged to Congress, which had the authority to fund whatever it chose to approve. CAA’s budgetary concerns, although perhaps honorable, were thus somewhat misplaced. As one member of the House Interstate Commerce Committee soon pointed out, Congress was ultimately responsible to the public for the air transportation system, not the unelected CAA. Part of the agency’s annual responsibilities was to provide a report on what it needed to safely maintain the nation’s airways so that Congress could then make informed decisions in fulfillment of its duty. In this view, CAA had prevented Congress from exercising its responsibility to the flying public by proposing only ILS and trying to ignore radar landing. The agency’s devotion to ILS thus seemed to many members of Congress to be protection of a pet program, not pursuit of the best technologies. By late 1946, the media had convinced Congress of GCA’s superiority, and Congress joined the anti-CAA alliance.
CONGRESS ENTERS THE FRAY
The midterm election of 1946 returned the first Republican majority to Congress since Herbert Hoover left office in 1932 and thus provided the disenfranchised Republicans their first opportunity to roll back the “creeping socialism” of the New Deal and attack Truman and the leftover New Dealers in his administration. The Republican leadership probably perceived that Harry Truman was particularly vulnerable to an investigation into his administration’s handling of aviation matters, since as a U.S. senator he had been a leading advocate of the Civil Aeronautics Act that had founded CAA. He had also chaired a long-running investigation into defense procurement during World War II, which focused on the aircraft industry.28
The Republicans had two pretexts for mounting the investigation. The major newspapers and the aeronautical press had noticed a “rash” of fatal air crashes during 1946, which the airlines claimed had resulted in a sudden drop in air travel. A number of articles claimed radar or GCA could have prevented many of these. The acrimonious debate over the two landing systems, which of course involved the much-criticized lack of radar along the airways, provided the other excuse for a full-blown congressional investigation.
The rash of accidents, in reality, was a statistical artifact. The commercial airline accident rate for 1946 was actually only about half that of 1945, but because the amount of traffic had nearly tripled, the number of accidents went up, and accordingly, so did media coverage (see Table 7.1). The crashes, according to United and Eastern Airlines spokesmen, had resulted in a “marked decrease” in passenger traffic from the previous year. Either the airline spokesmen were unaware of the statistics that their superiors gave CAA or they chose to project an image of reduced safety in order to “help” CAA get more money from Congress. Regardless, the airlines’ claims inspired great leaps of congressional rhetoric. Rep. L. Mendel Rivers (D-SC) declared, “The American people are horrified and scared to death.”29
TABLE 7.1
Fatalities per 100 million passenger miles
The perception that CAA was not doing its job was further reinforced by claims that radar (in the New York Times) or GCA (in Aviation News) could have prevented some of the crashes.30 The airlines had contributed to the perception of danger by trumpeting the merits of wartime radio and radar devices as safety advances, without making clear that these were years from being ready for actual commercial service. The public expected the number of accidents to drop as a result of these advances, but instead the number went up. Nevertheless, the aviation system was safer. It simply did not appear that way to a public misled by a number of sensational crash stories and equally ostentatious tales of radar’s “allseeing eye.” Congress chose to act on the appearance rather than the reality.
The second pretext for Congress’s investigation into CAA’s management of the aviation system was the ILS/GCA controversy, which had been rekindled in late November 1946 when the New York Herald Tribune and Chicago Tribune, as well as Aviation News, published parts of some allegedly “secret Army Air Forces’ tests.”31 These reports cited Lt. Col. Clarence B. Sproul’s claims for GCA’s superiority over ILS and provided much scientific-appearing data to back him. The appearance of these pro-GCA articles marked the beginning of a full-blown public controversy. Combined with the rash of air crashes, they virtually ensured congressional attention to the landing aids issue.
The House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, which oversaw the Commerce Department, convened hearings in January 1947 to investigate the air safety crisis and CAA’s management of the federal airways. The full committee was chaired by Rep. Charles Wolverton (R-NJ), while Carl Hinshaw (R-CA) chaired the subcommittee established to run the air safety hearings. In general, the transcript provides little evidence of political grandstanding, and the members seem to have been genuinely concerned with the issues in question, although the majority clearly did not understand the technologies involved. Hinshaw, whose Pasadena-based district contained substantial portions of the aviation industry and had long been interested in aviation matters, was one exception. Also, M. Harris Ellsworth (R-OR) clearly recognized the political nature of the controversy.
The air safety subcommittee heard a veritable parade of witnesses from the aviation industry over the next two months. Generals Ira Eaker and Harold McClellan were among the earliest witnesses, while the navy’s primary witness was Rear Adm. J. W. Reeves, head of the Naval Air Transport Service (NATS). Wright, and his superior in the Commerce Department, William Burden, were CAA’s major representatives, while Milton Arnold represented Air Transport Association and David Behncke spoke for the commercial pilot’s union, ALPA. Last to speak to the committee was AOPA’s Hartranft, who was asked no questions.
While the army’s General McClelland carefully avoided taking a position on the great controversy despite several attempts to pin him down, Admiral Reeves was happy to discuss the navy’s decision to use GCA exclusively. It had, he reported, enabled NATS to reduce its weather delays to an average of 2 percent of all flights. He also told that committee that in January 1947, in a period during which 45.7 percent of total commercial scheduled operations in the San Francisco area were canceled, only 1 percent of NATS operations at GCA-equipped Moffett Field were canceled.32 Reeves also referred the committee to Colonel Sproul’s report, which was entered into the record as evidence. Publication of Sproul’s test reports in the hearing transcript marked the first public appearance of the full report and no doubt helped convince the committee of CAA’s backwardness on the issue.
Clarence Sproul, now an ex-lieutenant colonel and the same man who had informed CAA’s Interagency Air Traffic Control Board (IATCB) members of the AAF’s sudden change of policy toward GCA in May 1945, had characterized his tests for the media as “proving” the superiority of GCA’s radar landing function over ILS. Pilots using GCA, Sproul reported, “achieved 350 per cent better runway alignment than those following the glide path-runway localizer beams of the I.L.S.” The most detailed publication of Sproul’s findings was in Aviation News. William Kroger reported that airline captains who participated had an average of 6,560 hours flying time, 40 percent had previously flown GCA, while 20 percent had flown ILS. Ninety-one percent were able to touch down with GCA, while only 54 percent succeeded with ILS. A group of fighter pilots, Kroger reported, flying the C-54 test aircraft for the first time, and with an average of only 805 flying hours, “were far more accurate in landings on GCA than with ILS.”33
Before trying to glean anything meaningful out of Sproul’s data, some discussion of the test methodology is necessary. Unsurprisingly, neither of the writers bothered to ask about how the tests were conducted, since “scientific tests” were supposed to be objective and report the truth. Sproul’s tests, however, contain a serious methodological flaw that renders the details suspect. The AN/MPN1 set’s precision radars were used to evaluate the performance of both themselves and the ILS.34 There was therefore no independent verification of either system and thus no adequate control despite the selection of “control groups” of pilots. If GCA happened to be in error, for whatever reason, the error could not be detected.
In response to publication of Sproul’s tests, Wright informed the aviation editor of the Boston Traveler that CAA had yet to find “a single case where any pilot using the instrument landing system missed the runway at its end by as much as 326 feet, which Mr. Sproul reports as the average error for pilots experienced in ILS.”35
CAA’s director of Air Navigation Facilities Service contended that an error that great at touchdown represented a 3.3 degree deviation from the landing course, which would result in a full-scale deflection of the cross-pointer instrument. No certificated pilot, he claimed, could be so consistently poor.36 Yet airline pilots did even worse than the control group average, according to Sproul’s data, achieving a dismal average error of 726 feet.
Despite the bias of CAA’s people toward their own gear, they were certainly correct in their belief that no pilot who had survived 6,000 or more flight hours could be so bad. The poor showing of ILS was probably due to a misalignment between the two systems, which would cause GCA’s performance to appear far better than SCS-51’s. Sproul certainly had no means to ensure such precise alignment, and in actual operation, very precise alignment is unnecessary if landing aircraft is to be done visually. Only automatic systems require the kind of precision alignment necessary to eliminate the possibility of beam divergence. Hence Sproul’s detailed data is at best unreliable, and it certainly misled both the media and congressional investigators as to the relative performance of the systems.
Nevertheless, some of Sproul’s data remains useful. One piece of data in each series, the “percentage of Approaches from which a Landing Could Have Been Made” is based in part on input from the check pilots, who were able to see the airfield. That eliminates some, but not all, of the pro-GCA bias in the numbers. Since only a few diehards within CAA still considered blind landings feasible—Sproul’s report rejects it explicitly—pilots would make visual landings after breaking through an overcast. Once CAA placed ILS in commercial service, it imposed a 300-foot ceiling, reducing it to 200 feet for each airline as its pilots gained experience. Hence, the 200-foot data permits some useful conclusions (Table 7.2).
TABLE 7.2
Percent approaches from which a landing could have been made
All pilot groups achieved better results on GCA than ILS, with the exception of the AAF’s Training Command instructors, who achieved 100 percent on both systems. The worst GCA performance was 87 percent, by the fighter pilots of Fifteenth Air Force, who were flying a C-54 transport, an unfamiliar aircraft of much greater weight than the fighters to which they were accustomed. That certainly made flying both systems more difficult, as they would not have been able to accurately judge the aircraft’s handling. All other pilot groups achieved above 90 percent. GCA direction was thus very consistent in its performance regardless of the experience of the pilots flying it.
The SCS-51 results, in contrast, vary from a high of 100 percent for the Training Command pilots to a low of 61 percent for the Air Materiel Command pilots. The worst-scoring AAF pilots were the least experienced in instrument flying. Especially telling is the 64 percent showing for the AAF headquarters pilots. Although they had a relatively high flight hours average, they were in nonflying billets and had not flown much in the ninety days preceding the tests. The poor showing indicates that their instrument skills had atrophied. Their much better performance under GCA in turn suggests that Glen Gilbert’s 1945 assessment of GCA’s greater ease of use was correct. The SCS-51 required more training to use successfully, and it required that pilots use it more frequently in order to maintain their skill level.
GCA was precisely what AOPA and its general manager, J. B. Hartranft Jr, wanted in a landing aid. Hartranft, a former AAF officer, had been the other AAF member of the Interdepartmental Air Traffic Control Board when Colonel Sproul had pushed for the cessation of ILS installations in early 1945. He declaimed against ILS and CAA’s old guard from the pages of AOPA Pilot, emphasizing that GCA would cost fliers nothing if adopted. With all equipment on the ground, provided by CAA, private fliers would have nothing to buy and no training to pay for.37 To the House Committee, he emphasized that the receivers were too large and heavy for private aircraft to carry. They were also too expensive at an estimated $750 apiece, in an era when an airplane cost about $1,500. They were not even available yet, and would not be for private fliers for several years. ILS was useless to the members of his organization.
Hartranft then argued that ILS would not serve the majority of airways users. According to his numbers there were 80,000 private aircraft in the United States, and only 800 aircraft operated by scheduled air carriers. The airlines thus did not constitute the vast majority of the flying public. Since ILS could only be used by the 800 commercial aircraft, taxpayer money should not be spent on it, especially since GCA was the “proven superior system.”38 He therefore demanded that Congress act to stop CAA’s ILS installation program, force it to dismantle the installations already in existence, and buy GCA.
Certainly GCA was the better choice for private fliers, for both economic and safety reasons. Implicit to Hartranft’s argument, however, was an assumption about who, exactly, counted as an airways user. He had pointed out that “the amount of cross-country navigational flying accomplished by personal aircraft owners and private pilots is much in excess of that accomplished by commercial carriers.”39 Pilots, he assumed, were the only airways user, and therefore private pilots were the dominant user, with military pilots second. The mere 7,000 commercial pilots were a distant third. The air navigation system should thus be designed to suit private pilots, and he railed against CAA’s “reverse thinking” in favoring commercial airlines and for choosing to solve only the problems of commercial users.
Wright refuted Hartranft’s claim that private fliers were the majority of airways users, explaining that the “person-hour” was the best measure of airways use and that “the individual passenger in a civil or military transport aircraft is just as much a user of the [air navigation] system as the pilot of a military aircraft or personal aircraft.”40 Therefore, of the 173,000,000 person-hours flown in 1946, 163,000,000 were flown in commercial and military aircraft, which could be equipped for ILS (see Table 7.3). In Wright’s formulation, the majority of users were passengers on commercial aircraft. The air navigation system should therefore be built primarily to serve that user group most efficiently, despite the imposition of higher costs on the private fliers.
TABLE 7.3
CAA Airways use statistics
AOPA and CAA could not even agree on who airways users were. AOPA’s bias, of course, is obvious. But CAA was supposed to represent all users, and its chosen statistic, the person-hour, did show a clear commercial bias. A large commercial aircraft, with many more seats, longer range, and higher speed, could rack up “person hours” a great deal faster than any private aircraft could hope to. The person hour was not the only statistic CAA had to choose from. Admiral Reeves, for example, had taken other CAA numbers and cleverly demonstrated that his Naval Air Transport Service was the biggest airways user, before explaining to the committee that anyone could make the numbers prove any particular case.41 Wright could have chosen some other statistic and thereby made a different argument. The case Wright chose to prove, however, was the commercial one. More than any other act Wright could have performed, his choice of the person hour reveals his agency’s bias.
Wright’s defense of commercial aviation certainly satisfied ILS’s most outspoken defender, the Air Line Pilots Association. ALPA had been founded secretly in 1931 by David Behncke, who was still its president, after the failure of an earlier attempt to unionize commercial pilots.42 Behncke was a labor activist, but he refused to involve ALPA with other labor organizations. He wanted pilots to be seen as skilled professionals, not as common laborers. Behncke’s protection of the image of pilots as skilled professionals helped the union immeasurably in its aviation safety campaign, which Behncke waged personally in ALPA’s monthly newsletter, through friends in Congress, and occasionally in more mainstream publications.
Behncke chose to attack GCA on the issue of safety. In the March 1946 issue of The Air Line Pilot, he had written to his fellow pilots: “‘GCA’ requires complete and precise coordination of five operators on the ground and the pilot in the airplane in order to effect a safe landing. Think this over for a minute and realize the possibility of human error involved plus the possibility of malfunctioning equipment.”43 Behncke believed that the additional humans in what we would call the “information loop” was bound to increase the probability of human error and thus cause more accidents than the mostly automated ILS. Because of this, he argued, ILS was the safer system. He moderated somewhat in his congressional testimony (where he advocated proper runway lighting as the most important landing aid), and in a later article in Air Transport, the official organ of the Air Transport Association (and therefore a management publication). There, he apparently decided to cleave more closely to the airlines’ official position that GCA should be adopted for traffic control and ILS should be the landing aid.44
In his own newsletter, however, he published the results of a poll he had conducted of the union’s fifty-three regional councils. Forty-six of the councils had voted for ILS as the primary landing aid, while only one had supported GCA. The remaining six had abstained, because their members felt they did not have sufficient experience to properly evaluate the systems. Behncke also noted that seven councils had written to support the use of GCA as a traffic control aid, although they had not been asked their opinion on that subject.45 Behncke thus had overwhelming support from his members for his ILS campaign.
ALPA’s public posture promoted ILS as the safer system, but Behncke also had other motivations. Historian Nick Komons has argued that ALPA is a schizophrenic organization, which uses a public rhetoric supporting air safety to mask its real concern, the economic well-being of its members. ALPA is, after all, a labor union, and unions exist primarily to advance their members’ economic interests. Yet unions also have tended to try to protect their members’ skills from being eliminated by technological change. ALPA’s defense of ILS was also a defense of pilots’ skills. As Sproul’s results suggest, ILS was indeed harder to use and required more training and practice than did GCA. It therefore maintained, if not actually increased, the skills needed to operate a plane, while GCA transferred some of those skills to a set of ground operators. Gilfillan Brothers and the AAF were already working on an automatic GCA, which was first demonstrated in 1947.46 The union’s pilots could thus look forward to a complete loss of landing skills within a few years if GCA were adopted. Automation of ILS, because the automation system resided entirely within the plane and was therefore under the pilot’s control, was a far more acceptable outcome.
AOPA and ALPA, therefore, had fundamentally different interpretations of Luis Alvarez’s GCA. One group perceived it as a means of improving their access to the airways system, while the other considered it a threat to their profession. The key issue Congress faced, then, was choosing which of these constituencies to favor. One member of the House committee recognized that this was, ultimately, a political issue. Rep. Harris Ellsworth tried to make that point clear while questioning Administrator Wright: “My point is the old question of how to spend money to do the most good for the most people. We are spending $6,000,000 [on ILS] for the benefit of 900 airplanes in the air today, whereas there are 50,000 planes which could use this other system of approach [GCA] ... Why not ask more money and put in this other system which seems to be admittedly good?”47
Wright’s only defense was to repeat that CAA believed ILS was the better system, especially if it could be supplemented by GCA at the busiest airports for traffic control purposes. The issue of better for whom did not, apparently, enter Wright’s thinking, while Ellsworth clearly understood that was the root of the problem. Ellsworth rightly believed that GCA was better for the majority of pilots in the United States, while Wright followed the bias of his organization and its favored constituents, the commercial airlines, toward believing ILS was a better choice. Ultimately, Ellsworth sought to persuade his colleagues that they faced a political choice between different interest groups, not a technological choice over competing claims of technical superiority. The two models of operation, groundcontrolled versus pilot-controlled, proved to be inherently political.
The committee chose to ignore Ellsworth, however, and focused on a different issue in its final report. The debate in the media had convinced the members that CAA’s plans differed substantially from the Pentagon’s. The members of the House Commerce Committee were very attentive to the needs of the AAF and navy in their 1947 investigation. In part, the members’ bias toward national defense issues derived from the almost complete unpreparedness of the AAF for war in 1941 and an understandable reluctance to see that situation reoccur. And although there is no mention of a Soviet threat in the 1947 transcripts, the neardisintegration of U.S. armed forces during 1946 had not been matched by similar disarmament in the only other potential world power. The members were at the very least convinced that civil aviation had to be built to be easily available for military use in a future emergency, regardless of the source of that emergency, and they focused on CAA’s well-publicized “disagreement” with the military over landing aids.
There was, in fact, very little disagreement between the Army Air Forces and CAA in terms of their landing aids policy. Indeed, Major General McClelland told the committee that the controversy was “unfortunate,” and had diverted attention from their joint integration program, while former brigadier general Milton Arnold, of the Air Transport Association, said he thought that CAA’s GCA work could not have been done better.48 Mr. Ellsworth ruefully admitted that “there is a tendency on the part of some of us who are laymen on this subject to grab at these two combinations of initials and consider that there is a battle on as between the two of them.”49 But because the majority of witnesses the committee had heard took sides, and the press clearly had as well, the air safety subcommittee was already biased toward an either/or choice. Ultimately, it did consider the two systems competitors, basing its final report on that assumption.
The final report therefore criticized CAA for its consistent refusal to accept the decisions of the military-dominated Air Coordinating Committee (ACC), which had called for cessation of the ILS program in 1945. The committee stated that “any area of disagreement between civil and military aviation as to navigational and airport approach aids should be immediately resolved in the interest of national defense.” The Air Coordinating Committee, the House committee members believed, was being held hostage by CAA’s refusal to accede to Army Air Forces and navy demands for GCA. It could do this because the Executive Order establishing the Air Coordinating Committee required unanimity in decisionmaking. The members demanded that CAA stop using its veto power to block committee decisions and recommended that Congress establish a new body whose structure would not allow CAA to dominate the military. Further, it recommended that the House not fund any new civil landing aids, including the twenty GCA units the army and CAA had negotiated a loan of, until such time as the Army Air Forces, navy, and CAA reached agreement on a common air navigation system. The House agreed, as did the Senate, and CAA found its entire air navigation plan suddenly in ruins.50 Considerations of national defense thus drove Congress to censure the Civil Aeronautics Administration, which the members were convinced was interfering with the Pentagon’s plans.
Yet despite CAA’s loss of FY1948 funding, and the harsh criticism it received from the House, Congress’s decision actually represented a substantial victory to the beleaguered agency. It had not been stopped from installing and operating the hundred or so ILS systems that had been funded in earlier budgets, nor had it been directed to install GCA in any form. By late 1947, therefore, the major airlines had begun using ILS at thirty-nine airports throughout the nation and continued to do so on more than 1,500 installations in 1998. Despite being castigated in every media outlet from Aviation News to Life magazine, and being subject of a congressional censure, CAA got what it wanted: an operational ILS system to serve its preferred customers, the commercial airlines.
Congress’s nondecision also represented a victory for the commercial airlines, which got a “good enough” system for immediate operation. They were not forced to wait another four or five years for radar landing, which would have happened had Congress forced CAA to conform to the navy’s decision. Not incidentally, the airline pilots won, preserving their skills and autonomy for at least a few more years. Their support was probably crucial, since pilots’ refusal to use the Hegenberger system in 1934 had doomed that system to failure. Congress certainly listened when Behncke insisted that landing lights were the most important landing aids, for the House final report elevated lights to its own number one priority. Finally, without ALPA’s support, CAA would have stood alone. The Air Transport Association, although supportive of ILS, ultimately wanted both systems installed universally, an outcome CAA did not support.
The two losers in this controversy were the U.S. Navy and private aviation. The navy did not lose much. Although its GCA-only policy did not get a congressional mandate, that hardly mattered. Just as the navy’s unique requirements had kept it out of the discussion in the RTCA’s landing aids effort during the late 1930s, its needs clearly made it nearly irrelevant here. No one expected naval considerations to have great impact on civil aviation. Congress was more interested in the AAF’s opinion, which, as the AOPA Pilot cartoon showed, was mixed, and therefore open to interpretation. In the light of widespread media support for GCA, the members chose to believe that the army, like the navy, preferred GCA.
The real loser, then, was private aviation. Without money, regardless of its intentions, CAA could not provide any kind of radar landing service to private fliers for at least several more years, and small plane owners had to wait until the transistor made receivers small enough and light enough to use ILS. Administrator Wright, who was personally a champion of private aviation and drove the development of a simplified plane designed for the “average” private flier, resigned a few months after the congressional investigation ended, perhaps frustrated that he could not find a way to please both commercial and private aviation. Private fliers were thus locked out of the air navigation system during poor weather, giving the lie to Wright’s own dreams of “commuting in the modern manner” via a plane in every garage.
CONCLUSION
GCA and ILS had politics built in to their very operation. The pilot-control model, on which ILS operated, favored skilled, experienced pilots who flew frequently, making it the obvious choice of professional pilots. The ground control model, on the other hand, favored the occasional pilot, leading to unswerving devotion from advocates of “democratic” flying. The two models sprung not from political differences between the inventors but from their design environment. Diamond and Dunmore, originators of the pilot-control model, worked closely with professional pilots in a project driven largely by the demands of airlines for regularity of service. That their system continued to be the choice of commercial aviation groups is unsurprising. The ground-control model evolved from Luis Alvarez’s experiences as a private pilot and a cyclotroneer, while he was working to overcome a military problem. That a military system was the more “democratic” may seem surprising, but the drafted and hastily trained armed forces of World War II had different technical demands than the post-Vietnam professional military. Alvarez’s system had fit the needs of a draftee military nicely, and the very qualities that made it useful in that circumstance made it the ideal solution for private aviation.
Just as the way the two systems worked influenced how they were perceived in the political realm, the way they allocated costs impacted how they were seen in Washington’s bureaucratic realm. GCA, while less expensive from the perspectives of the navy and private fliers, threatened very substantial additional costs to the Civil Aeronautics Administration. Its leaders had no reason to believe the agency would be given the additional funds to acquire and staff the new equipment, and the agency’s budget history suggested that it would be forced to terminate some of its existing functions to provide operators for GCA sets. That is, after all, what had happened when it tried to obtain a small amount of money to man the three test sets it had borrowed from the army. The agency quite rightly believed that GCA, whatever its benefits to aviation, would not receive the financial support necessary to operate it successfully; as political attention began to shift away from landing aids to traffic control over the next several years, the agency’s essential poverty became very clear. For CAA, if not for aviation, ILS was the correct choice.
The House investigation, finally, proved only a brief embarrassment to the administration. Congress’s decision to zero-fund landing aids handed Harry Truman plenty of ammunition to shoot back with. Congress’s nondecision also inspired widespread derision and disgust in the media. Truman’s own investigative committee, chaired by John Landis, chairman of the Civil Aeronautics Board, was thus able to turn the tables on his opponents rather easily. That group, picking up on the Army Air Forces’ program to integrate the two systems, answered Congress’s censure over the next few months.