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The early 1930s saw the first such airport cases;27 and a good many others followed, involving piston planes of increasingly large size.28

With this experience behind them, airport operators, manufacturers and air transport companies alike foresaw the increasing noise problem that the jets would produce. They were handicapped because the prototypes were military jets which could not afford to sacrifice speed or other flight characteristics for noise abatement. Nonetheless, in varying ways, they tried to cope with the civilian jet noise problem from the start, and, needless to say, all noise reductions that result from changes in operating techniques would be impossible without excellent cooperation from the pilots themselves.29

The first commercial jet flights by United States air carriers were in 1958.30 By the end of 1959, the National Aircraft Noise Abatement Council ("NANAC") had been formed "by the Air Transport Association of America, the Air Line Pilots Association, and the Aerospace Industries Association as a fully independent, non-profit cooperation, to meet the very real need for a single, central organization to coordinate a nation-wide, industry-wide attack on the noise problem". The Airport Operators Council and the Americal Association of Airport Executives later became members.

By 1963, before the turbofan generation of aircraft, NANAC estimated that the aircraft manufacturers had spent more

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