Jerome Lederer, 101; Pioneer in Plane and Spacecraft Safety

Aviation safety pioneer Jerome F. Lederer, who inspected the Spirit of St. Louis -- with some misgivings -- before Charles Lindbergh’s historic transatlantic flight and went on to head NASA’s safety program, died Friday in Laguna Hills. He was 101.

Officials at the Flight Safety Foundation, the nonprofit international organization Lederer established in 1947, said he had died of congestive heart failure at Saddleback Memorial Medical Center.

Among the many innovations credited to Lederer are the “black box” flight data recorders, carried today on almost every airliner, that provide investigators with invaluable clues in the aftermath of crashes.

“Jerry played a vital role in aviation’s evolution from rudimentary technology and systems to methods of aviation risk management that vastly improved safety,” said Stuart Matthews, president and chief executive the safety foundation.

Lederer, whose career spanned aviation from the early airmail flights of the 1920s to the space flights of the 1970s, launched the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Office of Manned Space Flight Safety after the launchpad space capsule fire in 1967 that killed astronauts Roger Chaffee, Virgil Grissom and Edward White II.

“Jerry was a realist,” astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the moon, said several years ago. “He recognized that flight without risk was flight without progress. But he spent a lifetime minimizing that risk.”

Lederer won more than 100 awards, including the NASA Exceptional Services Medal, the Federal Aviation Administration’s Distinguished Service Medal, the Daniel Guggenheim Award, the Amelia Earhart Medal and a medal from the Soviet Federation of Cosmonauts.

Born in New York City on Sept. 26, 1902 -- more than a year before the Wright brothers’ first successful flight -- Lederer said his love affair with aviation had been launched seven years later when he attended an air meet at New York’s Belmont Park. At age 18, he got his first airplane ride in an open biplane, and in 1924, he earned a degree in mechanical engineering, with aviation options, from New York University.

Two years later, he was hired by the U. S. Postal Service to oversee maintenance on planes being used on its fledgling airmail routes.

Flying the mail was extremely dangerous in those days. Thirty-one of the first 40 airmail pilots died in air crashes, and the Postal Service asked Lederer to help figure out how to reduce the fatality rate. He came up with filmed crash tests, like those used to test cars today.

“The usual cause of death was a fire following the crash,” Lederer wrote later. “We built a concrete ramp with a concrete wall at the end of it,” put the planes under full power, “and let them go down the ramp into the wall. Slow-motion pictures showed that, when an airplane crashed, fuel spilling out of the tanks -- which were carried upfront in the fuselage -- would go onto the hot exhaust manifold and start the fire.”

Lederer redesigned the exhaust stacks and other systems to reduce the danger.

One of those interested in his work was a young airmail pilot, Charles Lindbergh. The day before Lindbergh took off on the solo flight that was to make him an international hero, Lederer checked out the fragile, single-engine Spirit of St. Louis, which hangs today at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

“I did not have too much hope that he would make it,” Lederer admitted years later. “I just went out because I was a friend of his, and I wanted to see the airplane, to look the situation over.”

To the vast relief of Lederer and millions of others, Lindbergh made it, and within a few years, Lederer was established as a safety consultant for airplane manu- facturers and insurance companies. He evaluated risks, conducted safety audits, established educational programs and disseminated safety information through newsletters.

“He was knowledgeable, intuitive, a great influence on the aviation industry,” Barry Schiff, a retired airline pilot who now works as an aviation safety consultant, said Friday. “He was recognized in the industry as a rare bird indeed.”

In 1940, Lederer was named safety director of the Civil Aeronautics Board, precursor to today’s National Transportation Safety Board. He investigated accidents, established safety rules and studied ways to improve survivability in air crashes.

Among the innovations that he and others developed to reduce impact injuries were seat belts, padded instrument panels and crushable, energy-absorbing structural members.

But it was the flight data recorder -- a device that logs technical aspects of a flight, including power and flight-control settings, air speed, altitude and rates of turning, climbing and descending -- that Lederer considered his greatest triumph. Heavily armored to prevent their destruction in crashes, the recorders have often provided key information about the causes of accidents.

“The industry did not like the idea of having another device to maintain,” he said. “The Air Line Pilots Assn. protested and said that this was just nothing but a mechanical spy that would tell lies about the pilot. I put through the regulation anyway.”

In 1942, with America at war, Lederer was named director of training for the Airlines War Training Institute. He also served as a safety consultant for the 2nd Air Force and as a member of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, which assessed the effects of Allied bombing on the German war industry.

When World War II ended, Lederer’s attention shifted to the rapidly expanding airline industry. In 1946, fire erupted in the fuselage insulation of an airliner over Reading, Pa, killing five crew members. The accident stirred discussions about the need for independent institutions to disseminate safety information.

The result was the Flight Safety Foundation, which Lederer created a year later.

For more than 50 years, it has served as a worldwide clearinghouse for aviation safety data and as a storehouse of remedies to safety problems that it has helped identify.

Lederer retired early in 1967, but was called back to work several months later to head up NASA’s safety program after the launchpad fire at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Retiring again in 1972, he later served as an adjunct professor at USC’s Institute of Safety and Systems Management.

“Life would not be worth living without some element of risk,” Lederer wrote. “The right to take risks is one of our freedoms, but only when the risk affects our personal safety and not, without their permission, the safety of others.... This is an excellent reason to crusade for safety.”

He leaves his wife, Sarah; daughters Susan Lederer of Santa Rosa, Calif., and Nancy Cain of Oklahoma City; and two granddaughters.