Stuart Matthews, FSF past president, said, “Those of us who have been privileged to be a part of Jerry’s extraordinary life know him for his wit, creativity and inspiration in his tireless dedication to aviation safety. When Jerry began his career in aviation in the 1920s, pilots and airplanes were lost at an appalling rate, despite the skill of many pilots, because aviation technology and systems were rudimentary and aviation risk management principles remained largely unknown. Jerry’s legacy of ideas for sharing widely and objectively the lessons learned from aircraft accidents — and preventing the loss of life and the loss of aircraft by innovative methods — built a foundation for generations of aviation safety professionals.”

Lederer organized the Foundation officially in 1947 and, until his retirement in 1967, conducted many FSF research projects, international exchanges of accident prevention information, safety seminars and training courses for aviation accident investigators. He was concurrently the director of Cornell University’s Guggenheim Aviation Safety Research Center, which conducted an annual global survey of aviation research and recommended new targets for research.

Throughout his life, Lederer used his imagination to envision solutions to aviation safety problems. In speeches and articles, for example, he suggested methods for worldwide exchange of aviation safety information, for counteracting complacency among pilots of highly automated aircraft, for real-time remote monitoring of pilot/aircraft performance via telemetry and for alerting flight crews to signs of fatigue.

Safety Takes Priority in U.S. Space Flight

After his retirement from the Foundation, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1967 asked him to establish a new Office of Manned Space Flight Safety. Three NASA astronauts — Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee — had been killed in a space-capsule fire at Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., and the safety of Project Apollo had come under review. In 1970, Lederer was appointed director of safety for all NASA activities.

Lederer said that at NASA, risk management involved technology that was far more complex than anything he had encountered in aviation. Although redundancy and backup capabilities increased the probability of successfully addressing system failures, Lederer said that his experience with human factors, motivation and performance limitations also proved valuable.

“The most important thing I did … was to establish ways to motivate everyone involved in the project to do a good job and to be rewarded for doing a good job,” Lederer said. One such program involved distributing, to those who had served the program well, tiny objects that had been taken to the moon or on other missions aboard space vehicles.

At NASA, Lederer became acquainted with Wernher von Braun, one of the rocket scientists who guided the U.S. space program during the days of the Cold War. Lederer won approval from von Braun with a remark during a NASA meeting in which there was concern about the consequences if a spacecraft part were to fall from the sky. Von Braun turned to Lederer and said, “Do you have any ideas?” Lederer said, “Sure, I know how to cure that — everything we make, we mark ‘Made in Russia.’”

He shared his knowledge and experience in frequent lectures, speeches, papers and articles for 28 years after his retirement from NASA, including as an adjunct professor at the Institute of Safety and Systems Management, University of Southern California.

Awards Honor Lifetime Achievements

Lederer received more than 100 awards, most recently including the 1999 Edward Warner Award, one of civil aviation’s highest honors, from the Council of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) “in recognition of his eminent contribution to the improvement of all aspects of safety in international civil aviation.”

Lederer said that the following words from an FSF Distinguished Service Award, which he received in 1967, best defined his career: “For pioneering the flight safety discipline at a time when it was all but unknown, and for pursuing the objective of safer flight with a singular dedication, wisdom and courage. His belief in, and application of, the sharing of flight safety information and experience formed the cornerstone of the effort.”

The awards Lederer received included the NASA Exceptional Services Medal, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration Distinguished Service Medal, the Guggenheim Medal, the Amelia Earhart Medal, the Von Baumhauer Medal of the Royal Dutch Aeronautical Society, and the Airline Medical Directors Award. In November 1988, Lederer received the K.E. Tsiolkovsky Medal from the Soviet Federation of Cosmonauts. The award recognized his contribution to the NASA Apollo program. In January 2000, Air Safety magazine, published by Pakistan International Airlines, named him “aviation’s man of the century.”

When Lederer received the Wright Brothers Memorial Award in 1965, the citation read in part: “Aviation’s extraordinary safety record to a significant degree is a result of the tireless and devoted efforts of Mr. Lederer. For 35 years, he has worked unceasingly to improve all elements of the flight safety spectrum and concentrated on making compatible the primary elements of flight — the man, the machine and the ground environment — to ensure maximum safety. In accomplishing this objective, he has taken the leadership in correlating, coordinating and improving the flight safety activities of the many varied organizations and agencies comprising world aviation.”

Aeronautical Degree Leads to U.S. Air Mail Service

Born in New York, New York, U.S., Lederer first became interested in airplanes as a child. He said that his childhood memories included attending an aviation tournament, the second to be held in the United States, in 1910 and seeing Glenn Curtiss, the renowned aviator.

Lederer received a bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering with aeronautical options in 1924 and a mechanical engineering degree in 1925 from New York University (NYU) and served as assistant to the director of NYU’s Guggenheim School of Aeronautics. In that position, Lederer was responsible for building, calibrating and operating the school’s wind tunnel, which generated air velocities of 40 miles per hour (64 kilometers per hour).

“Only two other universities or colleges gave degrees in aviation [at the time] because there were very few aeronautical engineers in those days,” Lederer said. “One of my graduating colleagues in school, taking the course with me, refused to go into aviation because he felt it had no future.”

He worked as an aeronautical engineer for the U.S. Air Mail Service in 1926–1927. As the only engineer for the world’s first system of scheduled air transportation (1918–1927), he was responsible for modifications to aircraft, writing specifications and approving the reconstruction of accident airplanes.

Lederer said that in 1922, the Air Mail Service had received an award for operating for 12 months without a fatal accident, although 746 forced landings had occurred.

While working for the Air Mail Service, he met Charles Lindbergh, a pilot flying for an airline based in Maywood, Illinois, U.S., where Lederer also worked. In May 1927, Lederer inspected Lindbergh’s Ryan M-1, The Spirit of St. Louis, at Roosevelt Field, New York, on the day before Lindbergh’s historic nonstop airplane flight across the Atlantic Ocean. Lederer and Lindbergh became friends and maintained contact until Lindbergh’s death in 1974. (In 1969, Lederer invited Lindbergh to speak to personnel involved in NASA’s Apollo 11 lunar landing mission.)

During his time with the Air Mail Service, Lederer also published his first aviation safety bulletin. The service experienced many accidents and, as a result, accumulated a stockpile of salvaged wings without serviceable fuselages. He said, “My first safety newsletter was addressed to the pilots and said ‘If you do crash, please fly between two trees and take the wings off and leave the fuselage intact.”

Accidents, Safety Bulletins Set Important Precedents

In 1928, he became a consultant to airplane manufacturers and an insurer. In 1929, he was employed as chief engineer for the company that later became Aero Insurance Underwriters, at the time one of the world’s largest aviation insurance companies. From 1929 to 1940, Lederer’s responsibilities, in addition to evaluating aviation risks, included reducing losses through safety audits and programs, and disseminating loss-prevention information in aviation safety newsletters.

“Our safety bulletins were widely acclaimed [in the United States] and overseas,” he said. These bulletins were an early model for FSF safety publications.

Commercial aviation was growing rapidly by the late 1930s and falling increasingly under national regulation, including safety regulation. In 1940, the Civil Aeronautics Act created the Bureau of Air Safety under the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB), a predecessor of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board. The bureau investigated aircraft accidents and violations of aviation regulations.

From 1940 to 1942, Lederer served as director of the CAB Bureau of Air Safety. He had been in this position only one month when a Douglas DC-3 accident occurred in August, 1940, during a thunderstorm near Lovettsville, Virginia. Three crewmembers, one airline employee and 21 passengers were killed, including U.S. Sen. Ernest Lundeen of Minnesota; the aircraft was destroyed. The CAB, in its final report, said that the probable cause of the accident was “the disabling of the pilots by a severe lightning discharge in the immediate neighborhood of the airplane, with resulting loss of control.”

Nevertheless, Lederer said that during this investigation, a report had reached the U.S. Senate about what were alleged to be hazardous stall characteristics of the DC-3. Thus, the CAB was under pressure to ground all DC-3s, which at the time carried about 90 percent of passengers and cargo in the United States. Lederer arranged to borrow two DC-3s from local air carriers, and the airplanes were sent to Langley Field, Virginia. Aerodynamics of the DC-3 were reevaluated as the CAB considered, and then rejected, the stall theory in the Lovettsville accident. Changes in DC-3 pilot training later were implemented, he said.

During World War II, Lederer served as director of training and head of the administrative section of the Air Lines War Training Institute, which trained about 10,000 U.S. Army pilots and 35,000 maintenance technicians for the Air Transport Command. As part of the effort, he later said, “We wrote and published 15 books in 15 weeks. One was about survival in the event of a crash in the jungle, in the ocean or anywhere else they had to go. An aircraft carrier [ship] had to wait until we got that survival book published before it could go off to do its job.”

Late in the war, Lederer was appointed to the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey in Europe, which analyzed how effective the strategic bombing campaign had been in hampering Germany’s war-materiel-manufacturing capacity.

Accident Generates Concept of Foundation

Lederer said that the Foundation had its genesis in a Lockheed Constellation accident that occurred in July, 1946, near Reading, Pennsylvania, U.S. Five crewmembers were killed and one crewmember was seriously injured; the aircraft was destroyed. The CAB, in its final report, said that the probable cause was “failure of at least one of the generator-lead through-stud installations in the fuselage skin of the forward baggage compartment, which resulted in intense local heating due to electrical arcing, ignition of the fuselage insulation and creation of smoke of such density that sustained control of the aircraft became impossible.”

Lederer later said, “One of the baggage containers had a [glass wool] lining, and this became saturated with [hydraulic fluid]. An electrical connection sparked and the [insulation] caught fire, causing the plane to crash.” The investigation and hearings into the accident generated a meeting of aviation safety specialists in New York, several of whom were familiar with the newsletters that Lederer had published for the insurance company. They suggested that such publications would be valuable for the entire aviation industry.

Lederer organized a meeting, held at the Institute of Aeronautical Sciences [now the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics] in New York, that resulted in support from industry organizations to set up a foundation to disseminate safety information that would transcend competing commercial interests and national borders. The new organization was called Engineering for Safety, but shortly afterward merged with a group studying cockpit design, and adopted the other group’s name: Flight Safety Foundation.

The first seminar conducted by Flight Safety Foundation was organized in 1947 and had eight attendees, Lederer said. The following year’s seminar had an attendance of 50, and the Foundation’s reputation and attendance grew in the following years. Lederer said that the support of his wife, Sarah, and the work of Gloria W. Heath, the first employee of Engineering for Safety and a longtime FSF employee, were important in the development of the Foundation.

The Foundation honored Sarah Lederer in 1997 with a certificate that, in part, said, “While Jerry nurtured his dream of encouraging the sharing of aviation safety information, through the birth and growth of Flight Safety Foundation under his leadership, Sarah has played an essential role in the achievements and recognition that we are celebrating. With abundant intelligence and insight into the cause to which Jerry dedicated himself, Sarah has always been at Jerry’s side or with him in spirit, sharing the difficulties and the victories. Sarah shares with her husband the golden light that shines on those who have contributed to the safe keeping of human life through the Foundation’s work.”

Lederer developed many FSF programs that continue today: annual International Air Safety Seminars (the 55th to be held in Dublin, Ireland, in 2002); aviation safety research projects; and several scheduled publications examining various aspects of aviation safety. At the Foundation, Lederer also organized in 1948 the first aircraft accident investigation course conducted by a private organization, using as instructors his former colleagues at the Civil Aeronautics Board.

Aviation safety remains a subject of major public interest in news media worldwide. In the Foundation’s early years, however, reluctance to communicate publicly about airlines’ efforts to improve safety was common. Over time, the Foundation developed methods of carefully communicating factual information about safety problems and solutions.

“Safety was a hard sell in those days,” Lederer said. “That’s the biggest thing I had to overcome.” Lederer did so “by diplomacy, by not putting out things that would scare the public,” he said.

In 1956, Lederer was appointed to U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s seven-person Aviation Facilities Investigation Group, which organized the FAA and modernized air traffic control.

Risk Management Becomes Industry Focus

Accident rates in civil aviation improved dramatically during Lederer’s life. In 1926, when he began work for the Air Mail Service, one in every four commercial aircraft pilots was killed each year. In 1964, Lederer said in an article, “Today [an airline pilot] can secure life insurance at the same low rate as the floorwalker of a department store or a piano tuner.”

Lederer’s background in aircraft insurance influenced the terminology with which he thought, and spoke, about his field.

“Risk management is a more realistic term than safety,” he said. “It ever-present, must be identified, analyzed, evaluated and controlled or rationally accepted. Accepting the premise that no system is ever absolutely risk-free — or conversely, that there are certain risks inherent in every system — it becomes an absolute necessity that management should know, understand and take responsibility for the risks that it is assuming.”

Lederer wrote one book (Safety in the Operation of Air Transport, Norwich University, 1938) and hundreds of papers and articles. His government service included participation in the investigation of train collisions and ship collisions, and the evaluation of nuclear powerplant safety.

Throughout his life, Lederer has enjoyed camping, sailing and canoeing, and he estimated that he traveled a total of 30,000 miles on canoeing trips from New York City to northern Quebec, Canada.

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