The Copeland Committee was organized to investigate air traffic safety and the operations of the Bureau of Air Commerce by Congress. There were a number of factors that prompted Congress to commission this report including the TWA airline crash outside of Kansas City on May 6, 1935 that killed five people including Senator Bronson M. Cutting of New Mexico. The Senate appointed Royal S. Copeland (the chairman of the Commerce Committee) to head the committee. The preliminary report (June 30, 1936) gave a scathing account of the Bureau of Air Commerce for providing insufficient funding and maintenance of airway navigation aids.
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Copeland Committee Wikipedia(Text) CC BY-SA