Najeeb Halaby Dies at 87; Pilot Guided FAA, Pan Am
By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 3, 2003; Page B07
Najeeb E. Halaby, 87, a lawyer, Navy test pilot and venture capitalist who headed the Federal Aviation Administration and Pan American World Airways and was the father of a queen, died July 2 at his home in McLean. He had congestive heart failure.
Over the years, long before his daughter Queen Noor al-Hussein of Jordan became a celebrity in diplomatic circles, the sharp-featured and dashing Mr. Halaby was a prominent figure in the governmental and cultural life of Washington. He was a former chairman and chief executive of the Wolf Trap Foundation and sat on countless banking and airplane industry boards.
A pioneering test pilot during World War II, he settled in the Washington area in the late 1940s and held federal jobs involving military security and foreign affairs. He also was an executive in the budding aerospace industry and was known to insist on firsthand experience when regulatory concerns erupted over, for example, allowing sky diving out of a certain aircraft model.
When President John F. Kennedy appointed Mr. Halaby to the FAA in 1961, the press heralded him as a man who knew something about the business he would be regulating.
It was the start of the age of jet-powered transport, and the FAA had recently doubled in size. Mr. Halaby, who was administrator until 1965, decentralized authority and was a central force in creating the FAA Flight Academy in Oklahoma City. He fostered closer cooperation between the FAA and the Civil Aeronautics Board, which investigated air accidents, by adopting new safety regulations.
Juan Trippe, chairman and founder of Pan Am, selected Mr. Halaby as his successor in 1969. During Mr. Halaby's three years as chief executive, the airline suffered financial problems as competition mounted and he was unable to secure domestic routes. He also was the victim of some of his own innovations, including the purchase of an expensive new fleet of Boeing 747s that indebted the company for years.
He was, however, credited with expanding the airline's profitable Inter-Continental Hotel chain and with starting a route that would fly Vietnam War troops, at no cost to them, on their furloughs.
After Pan Am, he headed his own New York-based investment business, Halaby International, specializing in Middle East aviation ventures.
In the mid-1980s, he began a major but now-defunct effort called DartRAIL to finance a rail link in the median strip of the Dulles Access Road between Washington and Dulles International Airport.
Najeeb Elias Halaby was born in Dallas to a mother who was a native of Texas and an Arab American father. In later life, he was to describe his father as a businessman who "could have sold Stars of David in the middle of Baghdad."
His parents ran an art and interior design business that was part of the original Neiman-Marcus store. When his father died in 1928, he and his mother moved to Southern California.
He was a graduate of Stanford University, where he was captain of the golf team, and Yale University law school.
While working at the law firm of O'Melveny & Myers in Los Angeles, he began flying lessons that helped him rise quickly as a flight instructor during World War II.
He helped organize the Navy's first test-pilot school along the Patuxent River in Maryland. He also test-piloted the first U.S. jet plane, the Bell P-59, and made the first continuous transcontinental jet flight.
After the war, he was a foreign affairs adviser to Defense Secretary James Forrestal and helped develop military assistance programs. He was deputy assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs when he resigned in 1953 to help Laurence Rockefeller oversee family business enterprises.
Mr. Halaby told The Washington Post in 1978 that his mother, a Christian Scientist, was his guiding influence. She believed, he said, in the "perfectibility of the human being. This is the most pervasive stream in my life. That you really can perfect yourself. That reduces the fear and anxiety quite a bit because you think if you just work and try hard enough, you can make a perfect flight, do a perfect job, make a correct policy.
"Then you go on to true perfection, which is spiritual," he said. "That is why I have never been afraid of death."
His marriage to Doris Carlquist Halaby ended in divorce. He was married to Jane Allison Coates Halaby from 1980 until her death in 1996.
Survivors include his wife of six years, Libby Cater Halaby of McLean; three children from the first marriage, Lisa, who became Queen Noor in 1978 when she married King Hussein of Jordan, Christian Halaby of Atherton, Calif., and Alexa Halaby of Washington; and 14 grandchildren.
:woot: 
