Aviation safety pioneer Jerome Lederer, who inspected “The Spirit of St. Louis” before Charles Lindbergh’s historic transatlantic flight and went on to head NASA’s safety program, died Friday in Laguna Hills, Calif. He was 101.
Among the many innovations credited to Mr. Lederer is the “black box,” which contained flight data recorders now on almost every airliner. The devices provide investigators with invaluable clues in the aftermath of airplane accidents.
“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, chief executive of the Flight Safety Foundation, which Mr. Lederer established in 1947.
Mr. Lederer, whose career spanned aviation from the early 1920s to the 1970s, began NASA’s Office of Manned Space Flight Safety after Apollo 1’s launchpad fire that killed three astronauts in 1967.
Born in New York on Sept. 26, 1902, more than a year before the Wright Brothers’ first successful flight, he said his love affair with aviation was launched seven years later when he attended an air meet in his hometown. At age 18, he got his first airplane ride. Four years later, he earned a degree in mechanical engineering, with aviation options, from New York University.
After postal officials asked him in 1926 to oversee maintenance of airmail planes, he met Lindbergh, then an airmail pilot. The day before Lindbergh took off on the solo flight that was to make him an international hero, Mr. Lederer checked out the fragile, single-engine Spirit of St. Louis.
“I did not have too much hope that he would make it,” Mr. Lederer said years later.
