Saving Skydiving—Part 1: Controlled Airspace, 1965
It was September 3, 1965, and Russ Gunby, president of the Parachute Club of America (USPA’s direct predecessor), sat down across from my desk at PCA Headquarters in Monterey, California, where I was executive director. He had just returned from Washington, D.C. It was not a social call; the first words out of his mouth were, “We’ve got a problem.” That problem was Notice of Proposed Rule Making 65-23 from the Federal Aviation Agency (now the Federal Aviation Administration), which if implemented would mean the end of legal skydiving in the United States.
NPRM 65-23 sought to radically change FAA Part 105 (Parachute Jumping) by proposing to 1) prohibit non-emergency parachute jumps in federally controlled airspace and 2) prohibit non-emergency parachute jumps in or into off-airways routes approved by the FAA outside of controlled airspace. The petitioners—the Air Transport Association and the Air Line Pilots Association, backed by the Air Traffic Control Association and the Air Line Dispatchers Association—justified the proposal by claiming that numerous near-misses had occurred between airliners and skydivers.
This was the most serious challenge to skydiving in its short history. PCA had to take action, and it had a short time to do so. Defeating the NPRM would tax PCA’s administration staff—myself and five others—to the limit. Gunby and I got to work immediately, canceling our Labor Day weekend plans and spending the remainder of the day forging a plan of attack and making a to-do list.
The Plan of Attack
The foremost item on our agenda was to inform skydivers (PCA members or not), other supporters and potentially friendly politicians of the threat. PCA Treasurer Mark Baron, an attorney, promised to work closely with headquarters and started on PCA’s official response to the FAA. Gunby and I wrote articles stressing the seriousness of the problem for the September issue of Parachutist (held up at the printers so they could be included). PCA Board Member Lyle Cameron, owner and editor of the other major parachuting publication, Sky Diver Magazine (which at the time had a greater circulation than Parachutist), used the pages of his next issue to spread the word.
Next, PCA put out a special mailing to 550 Area Safety Officers (the equivalent of today’s Safety and Training Advisors), instructors, PCA-affiliated clubs, non-affiliated clubs and regional parachuting councils. This special bulletin outlined how local groups could enlist support for skydiving and included the NPRM and a sample letter (adaptable to individual situations) encouraging recipients to request that their members of Congress state their opposition.
PCA National Director John Singlaub, a U.S. Army Colonel (later Major General), was busy within the halls of the Pentagon. His work resulted in the entire Department of Defense becoming aligned against the NPRM; first the Department of the Army registered a strong protest to the petition, then the Air Force and Navy. The XVIII Airborne Corps, the Special Warfare Center, the HALO Committee, the Army Parachute Team and all four Fort Bragg parachute clubs sent strong letters of opposition. The Department of Defense even sent a representative to the public hearing to present a brief statement supporting PCA’s position.
The National Aeronautics Association and several of its member groups, several state aeronautics commissions and the National Association of State Aviation Officials came out in opposition to the NPRM. Pioneer Parachute Company offered support to PCA, as did equipment dealers such as the Chute Shop, Midwest Parachute Sales and Service, Para-Gear Equipment Co., Parachutes Incorporated and Steve Snyder Enterprises. Para-Gear’s owner, Lowell Bachman, gave of his funds and energy and had his attorney, Jack Cleary, provide his legal research to PCA for inclusion in its position paper at the hearing. Estimates are that some 300 various and sundry parachuting groups wrote letters to the FAA.
By the end of October, PCA and Baron had prepared the position paper, which explained that the foundation of ATA’s unrealistic proposal appeared to be the faulty supposition that eventually a parachutist and a commercial airliner would collide, questionable near-miss reports and an endeavor to solve a relatively simple problem through unwarranted elimination of parachuting rather than realistic and coordinated control. The paper concluded with this statement: “The PCA vigorously opposes the ATA’s solution to totally denying, in effect, the use of airspace by one user for the exclusive benefit of another user.”
Focus on D.C.
Gunby obtained approval from the PCA Executive Committee for me to go to the nation’s capital to conduct research and network two weeks before the November 8 FAA hearing. He arranged office space for me at the National Pilots Association in downtown Washington, and local PCA members supplied me with sleeping facilities and a car.
Part of my daily routine was spending time in the FAA building with two purposes in mind: checking with the Docket Section on the number of comments received on the NPRM (and their originators) and to find documentation of the near misses claimed by the airline petitioners. The first task was fairly easy; I just showed up and requested the latest comments. I was there so often, the personnel and I got on a first-name basis. History was in the making: Comments on NPRM 65-23 set a record for the most responses on any NPRM issued by the FAA—more than 500 as of the date of the public hearing. Skydiving clubs from every state; hundreds of individual jumpers, pilots and others associated with skydiving; and a number of members of Congress responding to constituent requests submitted their protests. According to the Docket Section, the average number of comments on any NPRM was five to 10 and the largest was approximately 30 (over a proposal to stop serving liquor on airline flights).
Obtaining documentation on near misses was more difficult. With multiple locations, it took several days and a lot of run-arounds before I finally found a lady who thought the records were in her domain. After expending $60 of PCA’s limited budget on sending roses to her office and an elegant dinner, she directed me to the most likely section. What I found would devastate the airline people at the hearing.
The hearing on NPRM 65-23 began shortly after 10 a.m. on November 8 to a packed meeting room in the FAA building. Much to everyone’s surprise, all three major TV networks were on hand—complete with their cameras, floodlights, recorders and what seemed like miles of cables—to cover the hearing for the evening news. They were likely alerted to the issue as a result of a prominently placed Washington Post interview that I had given, which was fortunate, since PCA didn’t have enough money to pay for that kind of favorable publicity.
Plans Into Action
We had planned our strategy for the hearing a few days prior. I had had a casual conversation with the FAA-appointed chairman of the hearing earlier in the week, and PCA, as the grieved party, was allowed to go last. This would prove a definite advantage.
The ALPA spokesman was the first to present an oral statement on what he called the “parachute threat.” He claimed that skydivers were a hazard and that near misses had occurred. The vice-president of the ATA spoke next, comparing skydiving with drag racing, which he said was not allowed on “busy freeways and turnpikes.” He also stated that, “Control is considered essential before a catastrophe might occur,” and then cited various near-miss reports across the nation. He concluded that the problem’s “magnitude is such that action must be taken by the FAA prior to, and not after, a catastrophic incident.”
Next was the eagerly awaited statement from Robert Monroe of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, which PCA officials agreed would have more effect than statements from the airlines. The nine-page document AOPA presented proved to be one of the hearing’s turning points. AOPA opposed the NPRM as being too restrictive, commenting that it would eliminate the sport. They stated that “strict or close air traffic control of jumping is impractical, probably unfeasible and certainly unenforceable.” Monroe concluded his statement with, “We hold that sport parachuting is a legitimate user of the airspace and that reasonable and adequate provision for its requirements must be made … we cannot and will not support any proposal which has as its central theme ‘Let’s get these guys out of our sky.’”
Then it was our turn. Following Gunby’s introduction of our presenters and statements, I took my place before the chairman of the hearing. I started with a summary of the growth of skydiving, its financial contributions to general aviation and the progress PCA had made in regard to safety in the sport, then stated that there was no substantive basis for the airlines’ petition and no need to revise FAR Part 105. But the severest blow dealt to ATA and ALPA’s claims came when I produced copies of all such reports on file at the FAA—a grand total of two—which I held up for all to see. (That night, the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite dramatically aired this moment.) My daily work within the FAA building had paid off big time.
In rapid succession, other PCA officials and members spoke before the hearing, including Dr. Leonard Thompson of the Ohio Parachute Association, who presented the mathematical probability of an airliner-skydiver mid-air collision. His research demonstrated that such a collision would happen once every 20 years if the pilot of a Boeing 707 were to fly over a drop zone every hour blindfolded, and all jumpers were blindfolded.
Baron, PCA’s attorney, concluded the hearing with statements demonstrating a tremendous amount of legal research, part of which went all the way back to English Common Law to refute the legality of the proposed amendments to FAR Part 105. By then, a large segment of the airlines’ representatives had left the room. Near the end, when each registered spokesman received an additional 10 minutes for remarks during the rebuttal period, not one voice spoke up!
One Fight Down, One to Go
The hearing was a complete and total success for the Parachute Club of America. We demonstrated, not only to the FAA but to the airlines and other aviation groups, that we were capable, organized and had the interest of aviation safety in mind. Perhaps more importantly, we demonstrated to all skydivers that the organization truly represented and worked for every skydiver in the country.
Four months later, the FAA issued its Disposition of Petition regarding NPRM 65-23. The statement issued on February 23, 1966, said, in part, “The amendments of Part 105 at this time or the institution of rule-making is not justified as to all of the amendments requested by petitioner, including its basic request to prohibit non-emergency jumps within all controlled airspace. ... (We) do not find at this time that it would be in the public interest to amend Part 105.” ATA and ALPA’s petition was denied!
We had won a major battle of historic proportions, but very few of us felt that would be the end of our fight to keep skydivers in the air. This proved to be the case in just a few short years.
Next Month: Part 2 – Fighting the Columns-of-Air Concept
About the Author
Norman Heaton, D-565, was PCA/USPA Executive Director from 1964-1975, a time when skydiving fended off tremendous threats to its existence. His efforts on behalf of the sport earned him the USPA Lifetime Achievement Award, membership in the International Skydiving Hall of Fame and the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale Paul Tissandier Diploma. He is the author of “My First 1,000 Jumps: The Evolution of a Skydiver and the Organization That Became His Life.”