Born and raised in Kentucky the son of a playwright, versifier and "wannabe" newspaperman masquerading as a lawyer and politician, George A. Hendon has spent the majority of his nearly eighty years as a student and practitioner of the art of managing ideas and people. Inspired to pursue a career in the federal service by an instructor in undergraduate school, he studied public administration briefly in graduate school but fell into a fourteen-year detour, working for a large New York financial institution as an internal management development consultant in their home office.
He is grateful, however, that FAA recruited him in 1965 to be a management analyst in their Washington headquarters, launching him on an enjoyable and lifelong career. His first supervisor there, the brilliant and respected manager of FAA's large and influential internal management consulting group, immediately pushed him to seek and take advantage of every opportunity to make a difference. This enabled him to craft, market and lead the implementation of some of the cutting edge management strategies in those early and exciting days when FAA was young and still an independent agency.
George rose to head the Management Analysis Division and, shortly thereafter, entered the agency's Executive Development Program, following the completion of which, he held a number of management positions in FAA’s Western and Eastern Regions until making a final move to Kansas City in July of 1987 as manager of Central Region’s Airports Division. Blessed with a relatively small but extremely professional, talented and dedicated staff he has been able to devote his time to practicing and polishing the management skills he had picked up over the years. He was recognized for this when named the region's Manager of the Year in 2003, but he values even more the peer nomination award presented to him by the employees in his division for "creating a great place to come to work every day."