Your Pickens County

PICKENS — Jerald Davis, eldest son of Curron and Era Davis of Pickens, was recently a recipient of the Robert J. Collier Trophy, the most prestigious award in aviation, for his work on the Commercial Aviation Safety Team (CAST).
The trophy was presented to CAST “For achieving an unprecedented safety level in U.S. commercial airline operations by reducing the risk of a fatal airline accident by 83 percent, resulting in two consecutive years of no commercial airline fatalities.”
CAST was formed in the late 1990s in response to a government and industry challenge in the 1997 White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security Report to reduce the commercial aviation accident rate by 80 percent over the next 10 years. Since then, the team has worked relentlessly to analyze data from approximately 500 accidents and thousands of safety incidents worldwide. From the distillation of lessons learned, the team devised critical safety enhancements that greatly reduce accident risk and ultimately save lives. As a result of this premiere program, admired and emulated around the world, 2008 topped the previous year as the safest year in commercial aviation history. Today, fatal accidents have been reduced to a probability of only one in every 22.8 million flights, an extraordinary achievement.
The Robert J. Collier Trophy was established in 1911 and is awarded annually by the National Aeronautics Association “for the greatest achievement in aeronautics or astronautics in America, with respect to improving the performance, efficiency, and safety of air or space vehicles, the value of which has been thoroughly demonstrated by actual use during the preceding year.”
The Collier Trophy is kept in the Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., and its winners represent a timeline of aviation, as many of the awardees mark events in the history of flight.
Some of its recipients include Orville Wright and Glenn Curtis (two of aviation’s earliest pioneers), Elmer Sperry (instrumental in the development of gyroscopic flight instruments), Hamilton Standard (the controllable pitch propeller), Howard Hughes, Pan American Airways, Chuck Yeager (breaking the sound barrier), Bill Lear (Learjet), Boeing (B-52, B-757, B-767, B-777), the X-15 flight test pilots, the Mercury astronauts, Donald Douglas and James McDonnell (McDonnell Douglas aircraft), Neil Armstrong (first man on the moon), the F-16 development team, the F-117 Stealth Fighter team, the Bell V-22 Tilt-Rotor team, the B2 Stealth Bomber team, the GPS development team, Jenna Yeager and Burt Rutan (nonstop, non-refueled flight around the world), the U-2 development team, and the F-22 Raptor team.
Davis was a 1960 graduate of Pickens High School and received his Bachelor of Science degree from Clemson University in 1964. He retired as a Lieutenant Colonel from the Air Force Reserves after 37 years of service and retired from the FAA Flight Standards organization as a GS-15 manager of its Technical Programs Division, where he established operational evaluation and approval requirements for many civil aviation programs, including satellite-based navigation and transoceanic operations with twin engined airline aircraft.
He now serves as President of Foxfire, Inc, his aviation consulting company, where he is currently working under contract to the FAA developing flight safety programs and the concepts and standards for performance-based navigation and air traffic management for the Next Generation modernized U.S. National Airspace System.