ICAO | 75th Anniversary

ICAO logo, introduced 1955.

March 24, 2021— It's the 75th Anniversary of the creation of the International Civil Aviation Organization, ICAO. 

My Dad's work for the United Nations began with his being sent to San Francisco for the formation of the U.N. in 1945. He represented the Bureau of the Budget. He had worked for FDR since 1933, the entire FDR term. One of the first acts of the U.N. was to create a conference in Chicago to establish a U.N. organization concerned with airline safety. 

ICAO was set up originally as PICAO (Provisional ICAO). Spike Marlin was the Secretary of PICAO. At Chicago they selected the location of the new agency, Montreal. They picked this city for three reasons, my Dad told me:

• Montreal didn't have a U.N. agency and it wanted one.
• IATA, the airline fare-setting cooperative, was already based in Montreal.
• Montreal is bilingual, English and French, and this somewhat mollified the francophones, who were annoyed that only English would be used to communicate with air traffic control towers. (In Quebec, local airlines still use both languages.) The two-language rule was overridden in the case of airline communications because one language was hard enough for pilots to learn.

Spike went to work for the organization when it was created and the family of six moved from Washington to Montreal in 1946. He worked for the agency for 17 years, until 1963. "I gave them the best years of my life," he said. He directed the ICAO's technical assistance program, which accounted for 1,500 staffers of the 1,700 employed by the agency.

From ICAO, he went to Geneva to become the third-ranking official at the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees. He was in that post for two years, and then went to work for the U.S. Department of State as Director of International Recruitment in the International Organizations bureau. His job was to find Americans to fill U.N.posts coming vacant. 

When he retired from the State Department he was recruited by the AARP to create the International Federation on Aging, to do research on and coordinate national policies about the problems of an aging world. 

https://my.faa.gov/focus/articles/2020/12/AVS_FLYER_AVS_ICAO.html

Story in the Montreal Star about Spike's work on keeping
open the Leopoldville airport, 1950s.