The Pilot-President

NAJEEB HALABY calls himself "a Lindbergh baby"--one of the countless youngsters who were so enthusiastic about Charles Lindbergh's flight to Paris in 1927 that they yearned for careers in aviation. The son of a Syrian father and an English mother, tall, dark "Jeeb" Halaby remembers that as a twelve-year-old in his native Dallas he turned out to cheer when Lindy came to town. Five years later, Halaby took his first plane ride in an OX 5 Travel Air and enrolled in a flying course. He borrowed $6,500 from his parents--who ran an art shop on the top floor of the Neiman-Marcus department store--to buy a Fairchild 24 sports plane, and kept on flying through college days at Stanford, the University of Michigan and Yale Law School (LL.B., '40). During World War II, Halaby helped organize the Navy's test-pilot school at Patuxent River, Md., and flew the world's first combat jet, a captured German Messerschmitt 262. Later, he took off in the U.S.'s first operational jet, the Bell YP-59A, determined to fly higher than any pilot from the rival Army Air Corps had flown. "I reached 46,000 ft., and that might have been a world record. Nobody knows, because it was wartime." As planned, he used all his fuel to reach maximum height, then started to glide back home. Engineers had calculated that the engine would "windmill" during descent and thus turn the generator to supply power to lower the landing gear. "Well, it didn't happen that way," Halaby recalls. "There was no windmilling, no power and no gear, except by hand-crank. I began cranking fast on my way down. I got in the final twist, and the landing gear went down just as I was turning for the final approach to the runway."

James Forrestal, the first Secretary of Defense, heard of the flying lawyer's reputation for courage and intelligence and recruited Halaby as his foreign affairs adviser. Halaby rose to become Deputy Assistant Secretary. After leaving Washington in the mid-1950s, he job-hopped, serving briefly as operating vice president of Servomechanisms Inc. and later organizing his own law firm in Los Angeles. In 1961, President Kennedy named him to the top civilian aviation job, FAA administrator.

Halaby was a highly visible, activist administrator, flying out personally to investigate every major crash. (On one trip, his plane brushed the wing of a Viscount while taxiing; after Halaby reported the incident, his FAA fined him $50.) He also framed new safety regulations calling for, among other things, improved radar and computerized air-traffic control and separate airways for jets and slower piston-en-gined aircraft. During Halaby's tenure, the airline fatality rate dropped by nearly two-thirds. Just before he resigned in 1965, Halaby flew an FAA JetStar from Los Angeles to Washington, checking in by radio with ground-control stations on the way to give the required position reports. One by one across the country, the controllers said their goodbyes. All were variations on a theme: "Thanks, Jeeb, for all that you tried to do for us."

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Today, Halaby still has his instructor's rating and sometimes rents a small plane for family outings. On these he is joined by his wife Doris and their children: Lisa, 18, a freshman at Princeton; Christian, 16, who is at prep school; and Alexa, 15, who is president of the junior class at Manhattan's Brearley School. Halaby is an occasional golfer and enthusiastic skier, fiercely competitive at any sport that he undertakes. An avid football fan, he flew to New Orleans in a Falcon jet to see the Super Bowl game. His interests also include ballet, theater (he is a sponsor of Manhattan's APA repertory company), and the Urban Coalition. Affable and outgoing, Halaby frequently gets out to Pan Am's hangars and check-in counters to meet as many employees as he can --something that Pan Am's founder, Juan Trippe, rarely did.

Halaby's combination of pilot know-how and managerial skill at FAA had impressed Trippe, who offered him a senior vice-presidency at the airline. In retrospect, it is obvious that Trippe was picking his successor. Halaby moved up to president in 1968 and to chief executive, at a salary of $127,500 a year plus stock options, in November. "I have been placed here," he says, "by Providence, John F. Kennedy and Juan T. Trippe--and I am in charge."

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