Vol. 5 No. 2, February 2008
RSS Feeds
Flight Path
For a half-century, the Hughes Tech Center has helped aviation evolve
Anyone who’s flown in or out of Atlantic City International Airport has seen the sign for the William J. Hughes Technical Center. But few locals and even fewer visitors have any idea what workers there do, or how long the center has been a part of Atlantic County. In fact, it has been an integral part of the area for decades, and celebrates its 50th anniversary this year.
The National Aviation Facilities Experimental Center opened in 1958 on the site of the Pomona Naval Air Station. The station, which was constructed in 1942, served to train air combat groups including fighter, bomber, and torpedo squadrons. A year later, the facility’s emphasis shifted and it was used only to train fighters.
After World War II, the Navy continued to train fliers at the Pomona station. In 1958, the site was transferred to the Airways Modernization Board, a division of the Civil Aeronautics Administration that coordinated aviation research. By the end of that year, the CAA had become the Federal Aviation Agency, and NAFEC became the technical arm of its Bureau of Research and Development.
Just as NAFEC opened, the CAA was closing its technical development center in Indianapolis. Many of those engineers, pilots, and technicians transferred to Pomona. Once the center was fully staffed, it employed more than 2,000 people.
According to a 1960 New York Times profile, the most important job for the NAFEC experts was cutting congestion near major airports. Specific projects included testing new landing strip lights, improving air and ground radar, and developing better ways to process air traffic control data.
In its early years, NAFEC was composed of 184 separate buildings, many of them dating to the war years, spread out over 5,000 acres. The very vastness of the facility proved problematic; one study found that the center was losing more than 100 man-years of labor time a year because of the time workers spent trekking from one building to another. In addition, the facilities were outdated and unsuited to technical innovation. So in 1964 the center began a three-phase building program that would significantly modernize its physical plant.
But the FAA only finished the first phase, and in 1973 FAA administrator Alexander Butterfield proposed closing the facility entirely and moving most of its functions to Oklahoma City.
In the pre-casino 1970s, NAFEC was the largest employer in Atlantic County. A shutdown would have been disastrous. So the “Save NAFEC Committee,” assisted by freshman Congressman William J. Hughes, began lobbying for a construction/lease program that would let the county build new facilities, thus keeping the center open.
In May 1975, those efforts paid off. Secretary of Transportation William Coleman announced that NAFEC would remain open, and three years later, construction started on a $50 million headquarters building. When it opened in 1980, the name changed to the FAA Technical Center. During the 1980s, the Technical Center was the linchpin of the FAA’s efforts to modernize air traffic control. Researchers added a human-factors laboratory to tested operators’ reactions to various situations, and an Air Traffic Simulation Facility that allowed technicians to recreate the air traffic patterns of any airport in the world—an early example of virtual reality.
In 1996, the name changed yet again. On May 6, in recognition of his passionate advocacy for the center, the facility was officially re-dedicated the William J. Hughes Technical Center. Since then, the center has weathered yet another threatened closure. As it begins its second half-century, it continues to lead the way in research for safer, more secure, and more efficient aviation.
