Story ID: 044
Oklahoma City: The National Airspace System's 'Treasure'
By: David Hughes
Caption: The Mike Monroney Aeronautical Center is the intersection of all things aviation
Word Count: 1904
While the FAA’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., gets most of the spotlight, the agency’s sprawling Mike Monroney Aeronautical Center (MMAC) is the agency’s operations nerve center supporting a wide range of activities involving pilots and air traffic controllers, flight inspectors, aeromedical specialists, and others in the civil aviation system. And it takes on an increasing role with the rise of commercial space, drones, and eVTOLs.
MMAC was founded in 1946 with a few hundred employees, and today it has 6,300 federal employees. About 5,000 work onsite in a 133-building complex housed on more than 1,000 acres next to Will Rogers World Airport. It is one of the largest Department of Transportation facilities outside of Washington, D.C., and one of the 10 largest employers in Oklahoma.
MMAC is named for Oklahoman Mike Monroney, a six-term U.S. congressman and three-term U.S. senator who headed the Senate aviation subcommittee and wrote and sponsored the bill that created the FAA. On Capitol Hill, he was known as Mr. Aviation.
If a civil aircraft flies in the national airspace, it is registered at MMAC in Oklahoma City in the Aircraft Registration Branch. If a pilot flies, he or she is licensed by the Airmen Certification Branch. If a pilot has a medical certificate from the FAA, it is managed there by the Aerospace Medical Certification Division. If a pilot is receiving educational materials on hypoxia or spatial disorientation from the FAA, it is coming from MMAC. General aviation pilots can even take water survival training here in a specially equipped pool.
At the heart of MMAC is its academy, which is where all the FAA’s lines of business intersect, according to the agency. Everyone from air traffic control (ATC) equipment maintenance technicians to aviation inspectors, Customs and Border Patrol agents, and members of industry organizations undergoes training at the academy.
It has received considerable attention of late with the effort to ramp up air traffic controller hiring; new hires receive their basic training at the center.
Keith DeBerry, former director of the academy and now COO of the National Air Transportation Association, called the academy “a national aerospace treasure” and noted, “ATC is always at the center of all of this, but what people don’t realize is CBP training is done there that’s not done anywhere in the world.” He pointed to training for airport officials, Part 135 operators, and other training as it strives to elevate safety. “The FAA academy is not only training the FAA workforce, it is training the industry as well,” he said.
ATC maintenance technicians learn to scale, inspect, repair, and replace radomes. Once certified for this work, they receive on-the-job training. These inspections require hands-on work to check caulking, cracking, delamination, foam density, and panel pressure. The technicians also learn how to inspect lightning rods. The FAA says this work can’t be done by drones using sensors.
DeBerry is concerned that the academy is not being used to its fullest capabilities and should have full funding.
MMAC has also been the home since 1961 for the Civil Aerospace Medical Institute (CAMI), which focuses on the human element in civil aviation for pilots, flight attendants and passengers and human factors for air traffic controllers. CAMI is staffed by researchers, doctors, other medical specialists and educators, pilots, technicians, and communicators. The organization is part of the FAA’s Office of Aerospace Medicine, which has eight divisions located in nine FAA regions.
CAMI handles pilot medical reviews and appeals, an all-important subject in the general aviation community. It also trains and evaluates medical examiners appointed under the FAA’s designated medical education program.
Hypoxic and disoriented
If a pilot wants to learn about subjects including hypoxia and spatial disorientation, the information will come from CAMI in Oklahoma. CAMI conducts water survival and hypoxia training at the center and takes some of its hypoxia training capabilities on the road. It operates an altitude chamber at the center for training and research. Its other equipment includes a narrowbody cabin evacuation simulator, a 747 with four sections for research on different projects, a 175,000-gallon indoor water egress pool, and a sled track to test and examine deceleration while achieving a crash-like impact of 30 g in 60 microseconds.
A Piper Mailbu/Matrix fixed-base simulator includes a head-up display with synthetic vision and can be used for conventional or fly-by-wire flight control research. Among other simulators and training devices, CAMI has an ATC research simulator and an ATC training and performance laboratory. There is also a vertical flight general aviation research simulator and a Frasca very-light-jet simulator with a Garmin 1000 avionics suite. A Gyro II spatial disorientation device with a computerized imaging system offers a realistic flight simulation.
An uncrewed aircraft system (UAS) control station simulator allows for UAS research.
NASA collaborates with the FAA at MMAC for a variety of training and research. Last year, two NASA research pilots completed water survival training at the FAA pool at MMAC. The pilots sit in a generic cockpit frame on the side of the pool that then flips over backward into the water to allow the pilot to experience escaping from a cockpit underwater.
The FAA is adding a new 43,000-sq-ft Wind and Wave Evacuation and Survival facility (WiWaves) for CAMI to replace its aging 1967 vintage Water Survival Research Facility. This will be used for training and research by the FAA, and it will also support activities for other federal, state, and local agencies including the U.S. active and reserve military forces, NASA, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol, and fire departments in Oklahoma City.
The water research tank will be 17 feet deep, 100 feet long, and 80 feet wide. It is designed to produce waves 10 feet high and replicate 27-knot winds to create a realistic rough sea state. This wind speed is Force 6 on the Beaufort scale, listed as a “strong breeze” where strong tree branches move and there is whistling in the wires. Whitecaps are common. The next category up, Force 7, starts at 28 knots and is a “near gale.”
The tank’s structure and mechanical apparatus will produce these highly realistic conditions. Researchers will evaluate slides, rafts, and other safety devices in these challenging conditions as they work to perfect test criteria and develop standards for life-saving equipment.
This research is critically important as highlighted in the historic incident in 1942. A B-17 was ferrying World War 1 fighter ace Eddie Rickenbacker to Guadalcanal, where he would observe American fighter operations against the Japanese and—once back in Washington—suggest improvements. But the B-17 lost its way and ditched into the Pacific Ocean due to fuel exhaustion.
The men quickly evacuated the flooding aircraft and got into rafts. However, they found three could barely fit into a three-man raft and two barely in a two-man one. Contractors had been skimping on materials used to make the rafts, and there was little food or water aboard. Under Rickenbacker’s leadership, all but one of the crew survived 24 days at sea. The Army Air Force investigated and made many improvements to water survival gear. The FAA will use the water tank to devise continuous improvements for this type of equipment.
The tank will be big enough for an aircraft fuselage to be lifted into it for ditching evacuation training and research. There will also be a large room for classes and meetings for up to 100 people, a laboratory, and a workshop to support the activities in the tank.
Michelle Coppedge, director of MMAC, told AIN that it will ramp up research that is aimed at reducing accidents and fatalities by “testing airplane ditching, water evacuations, survival techniques, and more.”
There are other organizations based at MMAC including the FAA logistics warehouse, which has 725,000 sq ft of state-of-the-art storage space for ATC systems spare parts. It houses 63,000 stock numbers to support the NAS, including some parts no longer in production.
The FAA’s fleet of flight inspection aircraft is also operated from MMAC, and new aircraft are arriving and being retrofitted to provide more efficient flight inspection operations.
It is fitting that this new highly capable research tank and other vast aviation research capability is located at MMAC next to an airport named for Will Rogers.
Rogers loved aviation and was a leading booster of it in the 1930s. He once said, “If your time is worth anything, travel by air. If not, you might just as well walk.”
Rogers was the son of a Cherokee who started as a trick roper in vaudeville shows. He later became so prominent as a humorist commenting on America that he wrote thousands of syndicated newspaper columns, appeared on radio, and starred in 50 silent movies and 21 talkies.
Rogers knew fellow Oklahoman Wiley Post who was the first pilot to circle the globe in a few hours short of eight days in 1933. In 1935, Rogers agreed to fly with Post on another round-the-world attempt that would go by way of Alaska and Siberia and maybe circle the globe. Post was the most famous pilot next to Charles Lindbergh. He tested the limits of 1930s aircraft with high-altitude flights. He also developed pressure suits and became the first pilot to experience the jet stream.
Alaska tragedy
Both Rogers and Post were self-made men and famous Americans in the 1930s. They tragically died together during a low-visibility takeoff from a lagoon near Point Barrow, Alaska, with Post at the controls of a highly customized Lockheed Orion pontoon plane. Shortly after liftoff, the single-engine aircraft banked sharply and the engine stopped as observers on the ground heard a loud noise. The aircraft’s right wing hit the water and the plane flipped over as the wing came off along with the pontoons. Both men were killed on impact in the crash on August 15, 1935. The nation mourned deeply as if the president of the U.S. had just died.
Oklahoma City also has an airport named for Wiley Post, which is a reliever for Will Rogers World Airport and is located 12 miles away. This airport, with three runways, is a center for business aviation with several FBOs operating there. More than 300 aircraft are based at Wiley Post, and the airport had 55,000 operations in 2021. Will Rogers has 72,000 operations annually and is served by dozens of airlines.
A Will Rogers-Wiley Post Fly-In is held each year on the August 15 anniversary of the day Post’s airplane crashed. It’s held on a 2,000-foot grass strip at Rogers' birthplace near Oologah, Oklahoma, which is northeast of Tulsa. The fly-in draws dozens of vintage aircraft. 
MMAC also receives many visits from U.S. senators, members of Congress, subcommittee staff, and FAA  and DOT executives. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg visited with Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt and Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt to learn about controller training. Buttigieg said during the visit: “Our ability to keep up after Covid and what it did to our (controller) training pipeline, which is one more example of what you do here at this facility, is a matter of national interest and even presidential concern.”