LOS ANGELES (AP) - Jerome F. Lederer, who inspected the Spirit of St. Louis before Charles Lindbergh's trans-Atlantic flight and later launched NASA's space flight safety program, has died. He was 101.
Lederer died Friday of congestive heart failure at Saddleback Memorial Medical Center in Laguna Hills, according to the Flight Safety Foundation, the nonprofit international organization he founded in 1947.
His career spanned aviation from the earliest airmail flights of the 1920s to the space flights of the 1970s. Over those years he was credited with helping bring about such innovations as equipping planes with ``black box'' flight data recorders that help investigators find the cause of plane crashes.
Lederer launched the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Office of Manned Space Flight Safety after the launch pad space capsule fire in 1967 that killed astronauts Roger Chaffee, Virgil Grissom and Edward White II.
``Jerry was a realist,'' astronaut Neil Armstrong said several years ago. ``He recognized that flight without risk was flight without progress. But he spent a lifetime minimizing that risk.''
Born in New York City on Sept. 26, 1902, Lederer said his love affair with aviation began when he attended an air meet at New York's Belmont Park.
He earned a degree in mechanical engineering, with aviation options, from New York University in 1924.
Two years later, he was hired by the U. S. Postal Service to oversee its plane maintenance. Flying airmail routes was extremely dangerous then and 31 of the first 40 pilots died in crashes.
Lederer helped reduce the fatality rate by coming up with film crash tests and redesigning the exhaust stacks and other systems to reduce the danger.
One of those interested in his work was a young airmail pilot, Charles Lindbergh. The day before he took off on the solo flight that was to make him an international hero, Lindbergh had Lederer inspect his single-engine Spirit of St. Louis.
``I did not have too much hope that he would make it,'' Lederer admitted years later. ``I just went out because I was a friend of his, and I wanted to see the airplane, to look the situation over.''
To Lederer's relief, Lindbergh made it.
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