Nicholas Sabatini, who began his working life as a New York City police officer before launching a 30-year career with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that culminated with a seven-year stint as associate administrator for aviation safety, died Nov. 27 at age 88.
After leaving the FAA, he opened an aviation consultancy to provide advice and safety assessment services to aviation organizations worldwide. He also served as a member of the Flight Safety Foundation Board of Governors.
Sabatini was born in Vasto, Italy, and immigrated to New York at age 2 with his parents and three older sisters. After two years in the U.S. Army, he joined the New York Police Department (NYPD) as a patrol officer and later moved to the department’s Mounted Division and then to its Aviation Department. He left the NYPD in 1976 to join the U.S. Customs Drug Interdiction Air Unit.
In 1978, he began work at the FAA, first as an operations inspector and later as Flight Standards Division manager for the Eastern Region, director of Flight Standards, and, in 2001, associate administrator for aviation safety. As associate administrator, he oversaw the work of 7,000 FAA employees and regulated more than 7,300 commercial airlines and other operators across the United States.
He logged more than 7,000 flight hours; held type ratings in the Cessna Citation CE-500, Douglas DC-9, Embraer EMB-110, and Bell Helicopter BH-206; and was a certificated flight instructor in airplanes and rotorcraft.
He received numerous awards, including, in 2008, a Presidential Citation from Flight Safety Foundation that recognized his “efforts to encourage broad-based and cooperative safety initiatives” and praised his work to advance “data-driven preemptive actions [that] helped lead the United States to its safest period in aviation history.”
