James A. Fay

Remembrance of James A. Fay

James A. (Jay) Fay passed away on Tuesday June 2 of complications from lymphoma at the age of 91. The list of people who will miss him is extraordinarily large. His devoted family of 6 children and their spouses, 18 grandchildren and 4 great-grandchildren, are the first to feel the loss. But close behind are the many professionals at MIT and a host of public institutions and causes that benefitted from his extraordinary personal talents. We are all of one mind in declaring that he was a delightful companion and inspirational individual to the end.

Jay grew up in Brooklyn NY but spent his summers in Southold, LI NY, close to the waters of Long Island Sound. This motivated his life-long interest in sailing and led him to a B.S. at the Webb Institute of Naval Architecture in 1944, while an ensign for the US Naval Reserve. Subsequently, he obtained his M.S. from MIT in marine engineering and his Ph.D. from Cornell in the unsteady propagation of gaseous detonation waves. Having served on the Faculty of Cornell from 1951 to 1955, he was recruited to MIT as an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering. He opted to take Emeritus Professor status in 1989.

The hallmark of Jay’s success as an innovator and contributor was to listen carefully and crystallize the essence of a discussion. Having reached that point, he was committed to seeing the process through to the appropriate conclusion. This was true across the board, whether it was a decision to perform a “ready – about” in a sailing race or writing a definitive opinion on the ecological folly of extending the JF Kennedy Airport runways into Jamaica Bay. His selection of research topics at MIT was geared to the common good: air and water pollution problems, acid rain, the safety hazards of liquefied gases, renewable energy, and the spread of oil and other hazardous liquids on the ocean. However, it was his early career work on combustion and detonation, hypersonic heat transfer, magnetohydrodynamics, and plasmadynamics that were the hallmarks of his election into the National Academy of Engineering in 1998. He continued to create new textbooks after his decision to become Emeritus!

Jay’s great ability to synthesize solutions in difficult circumstances was amply demonstrated in his service to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as Chairman from 1972 to 1977 of the Massachusetts Port Authority (Massport), the organization that controlled Logan Airport, the Boston seaport, and several other of the Boston area transportation facilities. Under Jay’s leadership, Massport made a miraculous transition from an aloof and environmentally-insensitive institution to the public-serving entity that we know today. In the words of Alan Altschuler, who was then Secretary of Transportation for Massachusetts, “Jay’s combination of wisdom, deep knowledge, total integrity, and courage in the face of (unfair public) attacks through even the most stressful controversies was absolutely remarkable.”

Jay played key roles in no less than 20 environmental organizations and panels that sought to develop public policy in a new world threatened with pollution and environmental hazards. This included 46 years of service as a Founding Director of the Union of Concerned Scientists seeking to ameliorate the threat of nuclear catastrophe. His reasoned and thoughtful scientific approach to these problems was critically important in building credibility for public examination of our approach to environmental threats.