Career
He was a graduate of The Leelanau School, a boarding school in Glen Arbor Township Leelanau County, Michigan, and is enshrined in that school's Hall of Fame. An alumnus of Stanford University (1937) and Yale Law School (1940), he served as a U.S. Navy test pilot in World War II. On May 1, 1945 Halaby made history by making the first transcontinental jet flight in US history. Halaby took off from Muroc AFB, California and landed in Patuxent, Maryland in 5 hours and 40 minutes.
After the war he served as the U.S. State Department's civil aviation advisor to King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia, helping the king develop Saudi Arabian Airlines. Next he worked as an aide to Secretary of Defense James Forrestal in the late 1940s, then helped Paul Nitze write NSC 68.
He joined Laurance Rockefeller's family office in 1953 reviewing investments in civil aviation.
From 1961 to 1965, he served as the second Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, appointed by President John F. Kennedy. Halaby was a proponent for the creation of the U.S. Department of Transportation, which occurred during his time in the Lyndon Johnson administration. From 1969 to 1972, he served as CEO, and chairman after 1970, of Pan Am. As Pan Am chairman, he was present at the christening of the first Boeing 747 aircraft.
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Famous quotes containing the word career:
“Each of the professions means a prejudice. The necessity for a career forces every one to take sides. We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“Work-family conflicts—the trade-offs of your money or your life, your job or your child—would not be forced upon women with such sanguine disregard if men experienced the same career stalls caused by the-buck-stops-here responsibility for children.”
—Letty Cottin Pogrebin (20th century)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)