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Roosevelt signs the Civil Aeronautics Act; federal hands take the wheel on American skies

The new Civil Aeronautics Authority inherits air traffic control, safety standards, and economic oversight from a patchwork system the airlines themselves had begged Washington to replace.

Through the early 1930s, high-profile crashes had killed prominent Americans and left the public deeply wary of commercial flight — yet the skies remained largely ungoverned. Airlines themselves, organized through the Air Transport Association of America, lobbied Washington for the structure that would restore public confidence. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Civil Aeronautics Act in 1938, superseding the aging Watres Act and establishing the Civil Aeronautics Authority to manage air traffic control, safety standards, and economic oversight. The agency would be reorganized in 1940 into two bodies — the Civil Aeronautics Administration and the Civil Aeronautics Board — whose combined grip on American aviation would hold for forty years…

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More from June 23
1972

Nixon tells Haldeman to use the CIA to block the FBI's Watergate inquiry

Six days after the break-in at Democratic headquarters, the Oval Office recording system captures the President invoking national security to shut down investigators.
1961

Twelve nations' Antarctic pact takes force; military operations and nuclear tests are now banned on the continent

The agreement, signed in 1959 after Argentine marines fired on British researchers, designates everything south of 60°S as a scientific preserve open to all signatories.
1972

Nixon signs 37 words into law; no federal program may turn away a student on the basis of sex

Senator Birch Bayh's passage, buried in the Education Amendments of 1972, draws almost no public attention at the signing.
17801776 Club
Continental troops and New Jersey militia blunt both British columns at the Rahway crossings, and the redcoats leave nearly the whole town in ashes as they pull back.
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More from The World Wars
1942

Navy pilot spots a downed Zero on Akutan Island; the U.S. has its first intact enemy fighter

Bill Thies, flying a PBY, finds Petty Officer Koga's crashed Zero upside down in the mud, a month after it went down during the Dutch Harbor attack.
1943

Roosevelt signs a monument into existence for Carver; no Black American has been honored this way before

The site near Diamond, Missouri, where Carver was born into slavery, becomes the first national monument built to honor a private citizen.
1945

The gadget detonates; 21,000 tons of TNT in an instant above the Jornada del Muerto

A plutonium device atop a 100-foot tower vaporizes the steel at 5:29 a.m., lighting the sky as far as Amarillo and melting desert sand to green glass.
1945

Churchill, Stalin, and Truman convene at Cecilienhof; a new Europe is on the table

Three months into his presidency, Truman sits down with allies to settle Germany's occupation zones, Poland's government, and where the Reich's eastern border will now fall.
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