Wednesday · November 11, 2026
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The air traffic controllers' union is formally dissolved; PATCO no longer exists in the eyes of the law

Eleven weeks after the walkout, the Federal Labor Relations Authority strips PATCO of its right to bargain for anyone.

By October, flights moved again, but PATCO's legal fight had not ended. The Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization had struck on August 3, defied a court injunction, and watched President Reagan fire 11,345 of its members who refused to return to work. On October 22, 1981, the Federal Labor Relations Authority voted to decertify PATCO outright, erasing its legal standing as the controllers' bargaining representative. The union that had endorsed Reagan a year earlier no longer existed…

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More from October 22
1777

Six hundred defenders at Fort Mercer turn back 1,200 Hessians

Colonel von Donop promised his men he would take the fort or die there. By nightfall he was shot through the thigh and left for dead.
1962

Kennedy goes on television: Soviet missiles sit in Cuba, and the Navy will stop every ship

The president calls it a quarantine, not a blockade, so Moscow cannot call it an act of war.
1879

Edison's thread-filament bulb glows for thirteen and a half hours before it dies

A length of carbonized cotton thread, sealed in glass, outlasts every filament Edison had tried before it.
18841776 Club
San Domingo alone votes no; France and Brazil abstain.
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Read the full October 22 edition →Everything that happened on October 22 →
More from Cold War America
1973

Two Justice Department chiefs quit in one night rather than fire the Watergate prosecutor

Nixon finally finds a third official willing to do it: Solicitor General Robert Bork.
1959

Eisenhower signs over the Army's rocket men; von Braun now works for NASA

The order strips most of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency and hands its hardware and people to the year-old civilian space agency.
1959

Wright's spiral museum opens its doors on Fifth Avenue

The architect died in April; the building he fought sixteen years to see built opened without him in October.
1946

A camera rides a captured Nazi rocket 65 miles up and photographs the curve of the Earth

The rocket smashed into the New Mexico desert, but the film survived.
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