News

Why Join

Events

Awards
- Aero Club Trophy<
- Wright Dinner

Education

Board

Aviation Links

Aero Club of Washington Awards

Aero Club of Washington Honors Langhorne Bond
with Engen Trophy

A Tribute to the Honorable Langhorne Bondon the occasion of his receipt of the 2007 Donald D. Engen Aero Club Trophy for Aviation Excellence Remarks of Jeffrey N. Shane, Under Secretary for Policy U.S. Department of Transportation, Washington, November 28, 2007

It is a great privilege to be able to say a few words about my friend of many years, Langhorne Bond.

I know that the Engen Trophy is being bestowed in recognition of Langhorne's immense contributions to aviation over the span of his wonderful career. Immense contributions are certainly a reason to admire Langhorne, but they aren't really the reason people like him so much. We like him because he's unfailingly honest in a town that too often traffics in mendacity, because he's an iconoclast who always calls ‘em the way he sees ‘em, and because – how else can I put it – because he's larger than life -- a renowned raconteur, a bon vivant, a man about town. He has raced sports cars; he's a force in Virginia 's steeplechase racing community; he's a pilot. Best of all, he's married to the beautiful and brilliant Queta Bond, who's sitting at the table right here in the front.

I'll get to his contributions to aviation in a moment, but I want to tell you some things about Langhorne that you don't know.

First, Langhorne actually helped create the Department of Transportation. I'm personally grateful to him for that because if he'd failed, I don't know what I would have been doing all these years.

He got his undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Virginia; he's an honors graduate of McGill's Institute of Air and Space Law; and he also studied at the London School of Economics and Oxford. It was an education that can fairly be characterized, Langhorne, as excessive .

When he finally decided to start working for a living in 1965, Langhorne got appointed special assistant to an Under Secretary of Commerce named Alan Boyd during the Lyndon Johnson Administration. LBJ decided to create a new, Cabinet-level Department of Transportation, pulling together for the first time a host of agencies from all over government that had transportation responsibilities. Langhorne was sent off to lobby the transportation associations and Congress for passage of what became the DOT Act.

After the law was passed in 1966, LBJ selected Alan Boyd as the nation's first Secretary of Transportation. Secretary Boyd brought Langhorne with him to the new department and made him the equivalent of DOT's first chief of staff. It's a long forgotten fact that the entire Office of the Secretary of Transportation in those early years was squeezed onto the eighth floor of the FAA Building . It was a building Langhorne would come to know well.

I first met Langhorne about a year later, when I joined DOT as a fledgling litigator. You couldn't help but notice him. First of all, he roared into work every day on a Honda Superhawk. That's the legendary bike that Robert Pirsig rode while writing Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance . Personally, I can't say I ever noticed any intersection between Langhorne Bond and Zen. Instead, Langhorne was known for offering his special brand of unvarnished, no-nonsense advice. As a reward for his service, Secretary Boyd made Langhorne an assistant administrator of the Urban Mass Transportation Administration – precursor to today's Federal Transit Administration – during his last year there.

In 1969, after President Nixon's inauguration, Langhorne became director of the National Transportation Center in Pittsburgh until 1973. He did some great things for mass transit in that job, but also confirmed his defiantly independent spirit by heading up the local chapter of Democrats for Nixon during the 1972 campaign. Go figure.

It was in 1973 that Illinois Governor Dan Walker appointed Langhorne as the state's Secretary of Transportation. Dan Walker was a Democrat and must not have known whom Langhorne had supported for President. The next Governor of Illinois was a Republican -- Jim Thompson. Governor Thompson wisely kept Langhorne in the job.

The point of all this is that Langhorne has done a lot more than work on aviation in his career. He's the true “multi-modal man.”

In early 1977, President Jimmy Carter nominated Langhorne Bond as Federal Aviation Administrator. He left Springfield and returned to his old haunt on Independence Avenue . His office was now on the tenth floor of the FAA Building , two floors up from where he and Alan Boyd had launched the Department of Transportation a decade earlier.

And of course, it was in that position that Langhorne began to carve out his uniquely important career in aviation and aviation safety. During his four years at the FAA he initiated development of TCAS – the Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System – and implemented the Ground Proximity Warning System. He approved the first over-water air carrier service based on a two-engine operation.

There were a great many other achievements as well. He was, as you would expect, all about safety. If you have occasion to visit the FAA Administrator's suite, be sure to find Langhorne's official portrait, hanging just outside the famous “round room.” In addition to noticing that the guy in that painting doesn't look very different from the one who's sitting with us here today, you will also discover, if you look carefully, that he's wearing both a belt and suspenders. Langhorne dressed with a purpose the day he sat for that portrait, and the aviation safety message he meant to convey is clear. It was a message to the industry and to his successors.

After leaving FAA in 1981, Langhorne became a widely sought after aviation consultant. He worked to alter the international standard which had barred single engine turbine aircraft from commercial operations. As a result, ICAO adopted a new worldwide standard in 2005 that enabled single engine turbo prop manufacturers to continue their strong growth and that facilitated the development of a revolutionary new aircraft type – the single engine biz jet.

For the past decade or so, Langhorne has been focusing his intellect on the opportunities and challenges posed by satellite-based navigation. After the advent of GPS and the earliest suggestions that that astonishing new technology might well provide a vital new platform for air traffic management, Langhorne was one of the first to raise a cautionary flag. Noting that GPS satellites emit a pretty faint signal from about 11,000 miles away, what will happen, he asked, if there's a malfunction, or if the signal is jammed? Five years ago DOT's Volpe Research Center produced a major study validating what Langhorne had been saying. Sometime thereafter, based largely on that study, President Bush signed a National Presidential Security Directive on GPS that called for the formal identification of a backup system. That's a work in progress as we speak. DOT represents the civil user community within the government's GPS governance structure, and that role has meant that Langhorne and I are once again spending a lot of quality time together. As you would expect, it's one of the reasons I enjoy my job so much.

I know that this very brief account really doesn't do sufficient justice to Langhorne's protean career, nor to his remarkable life, but I hope it will provide at least a few hints of why Langhorne is so deserving of the Engen Trophy and of our everlasting esteem.

Past Recipients