RTCA President Margaret Jenny. Photo courtesy of RTCA
Margaret Jenny, president of the Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics (RTCA), will retire at the end of her current five-year contract. Jenny has informed RTCA’s board of directors that she will step down from her post in August.
Jenny has served as president of RTCA since 2008. During her tenure, she helped RTCA form the NextGen Advisory Committee, which became a platform where experts from the aviation industry could collaborate with civil aviation regulators to deploy the system of systems that is the next generation of air transportation system for the U.S., better known as NextGen.
“It has been an honor and a privilege to lead this organization for the past 10 years, and I am proud of what our team and the hundreds of participants on our committees have accomplished,” said Jenny, in a statement on RTCA’s website.
RTCA’s membership includes 23 special committees that hold 2,500 committee meetings annually and features more than 10,000 industry experts spanning 35 different countries.
Jenny’s retirement from RTCA comes as the umbrella agreement under which RTCA has operated as a federal advisory agency to the FAA expired at the end of May. RTCA said it would launch as the RTCA Standards Development Organization (SDO) in an announcement posted to its website May 18. The organization will continue to produce performance-base standards independently.
Upon learning of her retirement from RTCA, NBAA President and CEO Ed Bolen described Jenny as leading a “pioneering effort to establish the organization’s legendary Task Force 5, which laid the groundwork for the NextGen Advisory Committee.”
“Simply put, Margaret’s work at RTCA has not only set the foundation for the development and implementation of ‘NextGen,’ but helped turn what was once a massive, complex and largely unworkable idea into consensus plan that is clear, measurable and yielding real benefits to both the aviation community and the general public,” said Bolen.