Rodeo in the Sky - Early Air Traffic Control

Today, Air Traffic Control towers loom over airports, bringing order and safety to a huge network of airplanes crossing the globe. But what was it like to fly in the earliest days of aviation, before radios or signal towers? Retired FAA Air Traffic Controller Helen Parke-Wall shares stories from the beginnings of ATC.

If you’ve hiked the prairies of the Midwest or the back country of the Southwestern United States, you may have stumbled across a massive, concrete arrow embedded into the ground. No, this wasn’t a relic of some long-forgotten civilization. It was one of several early attempts to help pilots find their way through the perilous skies of early aviation history. Museum of Flight Docent and retired FAA Executive/Air Traffic Controller Helen Parke-Wall sat down with us to talk about the origins of the Federal Aviation Administration.

See some of the early tools for aviation navigation and organization yourself in The Museum of Flight’s Red Barn and Great Gallery exhibits. Plan your visit at http://museumofflight.org/.

Check out Airplane Geeks Podcast episode 539, featuring Museum of Flight Docent/Boeing 747 first flight test team member Thomas Gray and The Flight Deck host Sean Mobley here: http://www.airplanegeeks.com/2019/02/13/539-boeing-747-first-flight/. Thanks Airplane Geeks for the chance to chat!

Host: Sean Mobley
Producer: Sean Mobley
Webmaster: Layne Benofsky
Content Marketing Manager: Irene Jagla

Transcript:

SEAN MOBLEY:       The Flight Deck is made possible by the generous donors supporting The Museum of Flight. You can support this podcast and The Museum of Flight’s other initiatives across the United States and the world by visiting www.museumofflight.org/podcast.

Hello and welcome to The Flight Deck, the podcast of The Museum of Flight in Seattle, Washington. I am your host, Sean Mobley. As a kid and even now as an adult, whenever I am at the airport, or whenever I look up and see planes flying overhead, I can’t help but marvel at the elaborate control systems that have to be in place to keep these planes moving without running into each other.

For today’s episode, I sat down with Helen Parkwall, a docent at The Museum of Flight. Helen worked on her commercial pilots license in the late ‘60s and took a job with the FAA, becoming an air traffic controller. Her career with the FAA took her all over the country, finally retiring as the FAA air traffic division manager of the northwest mountain region before she came to volunteer here at the museum. Obviously, her career itself could be a topic of discussion on the podcast, but she’s joining me today to talk about some history of air traffic control.

00:01:28

Now her discussion was so interesting that I had trouble cutting it down, so this is part one of a two part series. In this first episode, Helen talks about the earliest days of air traffic control or how you get a bunch of independent hardheaded daredevil pilots to get in line for takeoff and landing.

HELEN PARKWALL:           Well, I started with the FAA in 1968, and I was hired as an air traffic controller, and that meant that I had taken a civil service exam and I had qualified on a register. That’s how the government did a lot, and probably still does, a lot of their hiring. The agency trained me. My background was that I was already a pilot. I had 300 hours of flight time, and that met the requirements to be eligible. If you had been a military controller, you were automatically eligible, because you had experience as a controller, and you had veteran’s preference. I was not a veteran, so I did not have veteran’s preference, but this is the way it was in the late ‘60s, and the agency was going through a period where they needed to hire a lot of people. All the hiring is cyclic because it’s driven by the budget cycle.

00:02:47

The budget is created, and whoever has the greatest need gets the money, and sometimes air traffic control didn’t, so there were periods where they didn’t have to do any hiring, and then there were great periods where they had to do a lot of hiring.

SM:     Right. Was there an explosion in aviation around that time that just caused people to be more (crosstalk 00:03:11)?

HP:      The controllers that were onboard had reached the age of retirement. There had been some unfortunate accidents even back then that seemed to always have a greater impact. The state of the art and the technology was changing, and the air traffic activity was increasing. More and more people were flying, more and more airplanes. You’re talking about the jet age, you’re getting there faster, you have a mix of faster and slower airplanes. And when you are a controller, if you work especially in the enroute option, you manage all of the military traffic also. Not when it’s on a base, but you manage it when it’s flying in the airspace going back and forth. The enroute option controlled all the airspace away from the terminals and from the airports, perse, all the way up to infinity actually or as far as airplanes in that day were flying. You know, and the flight levels.

SM:     The technology certainly has come a long way, definitely today and looking all the way back to the Wrights. Was there any sort of air traffic control before the Wrights? There were balloons. I mean, they were the first airplane, but they weren’t the first to fly necessarily, depending on how you define it.

00:04:31

HP:      No, but I think when we started realizing that there was a need for people to have a means to navigate, and I’m thinking back to the early days when people were flying, the postal service especially, or when the contract mail was being initiated. Sometimes those pilots had to fly four or 500 feet above the ground to be able to see. And of course that would limit them, unless it was a clear night, to flying during the day. If they didn’t get somewhere until later, it was necessary to light bonfires. So that became the methodology that they used. If the weather was bad, it became a decision of the pilot. If he thought he could see in the weather that was occurring, he could continue the flight, but they lost many, many. Many airplanes and many people. And it became clear that they needed to make some changes.

One of the changes was that structure of lights, the beacons that were put in place along with large concrete arrows that would point to major cities. And the lights and these concrete arrows were spaced about ten miles apart. So if you were flying at night, you would see this beacon flashing. The theory was with the light there you could also see the arrow and you could get some directional information. So that helped. It helped quite a bit. It was really only functional for about ten years, because radios started to become used in the ‘30s, but it was still a pretty novel concept.

SM:     Novel is the right word.

HP:      Yeah.

00:06:07

SM:     I love the idea of just giant concrete arrows dotting the American countryside.

HP:      Well, some of them, they never removed and people come across them now. But as far as the beacons, I think there have been a few of those preserved.

SM:     Including one here.

HP:      Okay. That’s right. We have one here in the museum. And back in the early ‘60s, I can still remember flying and seeing the beacons, because they had not all been removed in some of the mountainous areas. So some of the popular routes you could still see them visually.

SM:     Yeah. And the arrows, some of them are still there. Like you said, you hear about this, but then I’ve had volunteers come in and show me, they went on vacation and they found these arrows.

HP:      They found one.

SM:     Was that effort organized at any governmental level or any official level? At what point did the federal government really start getting into this?

00:07:02

HP:      Well, that system of beacons and the concrete arrows was driven by the government, but as things start evolving, the kinds of facilities that were developed, it was kind of key to communication. And as I mentioned, it had to do with the fact that pilots could talk with someone now to someone that was on the ground, and they could exchange information. And initially, when that started, before that, people had to rely on hand signals or something very visual. And if you wanted to land at an airport, if it was a beautiful day, you still had many people that wanted to land there at the same time, so structure had to be evolved. And many of the local communities, and this is how it started, there’s probably more than one person that will say that they were the first air traffic controller, but generally the belief is that it was Archie League. And he worked in St. Louis, and he was hired by the community there. And what he had was some flags, and a wheelbarrow, and he had something that he could sit on, and he kept supplies in that. He would go out into the field. And depending on what was going on, he would use a different colored flag to indicate it was safe to land, or a different color if it was not and would waive people off.

Now what followed using the flags were the use of light gun signals, and the light gun signals would be keyed to red would mean no, don’t land, green, that would be a good one, and then there was a combination of signals. Flashing green, flashing red, red and green meaning it was unsafe, and then white. But all these things, a pilot that is in training would begin to understand what it meant. I said we had radios, but sometimes those radios didn’t work, so the light gun signals are still available in some of the towers, because if someone lost their radio, that’s how they could communicate with a tower to get a clearance to land safely.

00:09:16

SM:     We have one of those that people can actually pick up in the Aerospace Education Center. It’s big. I don’t know if it’s the same thing. So one of the differences then is a flag, everyone can see, so it might not be clear necessarily who’s getting flagged in, but a light gun you can point at one specific plane and let them know, “Hey, it’s your turn.”

HP:      The way the light gun signal works now today, not everybody is going to lose communication, so those people that are on the same frequency of course are aware of what’s going on visually in the traffic pattern or entering the traffic pattern. That traffic would be pointed out to you. So whoever is having a problem is given the right of way to go in, and it provides an option for everyone, the way the system is flown, the awareness. They use a phrase about having the picture, meaning that you know where everyone is in a certain area. Where you are, where your traffic is, and how you fit into that picture.

SM:     When did the idea of the tower come along?

HP:      Well, it evolved, and the reason is that airports are hopefully always on nice flat land, and they require a lot of land. And initially, they put up structures, hangers along the sides of the runways. And the idea became that it would be a greater thought to have someone at a higher elevation. They could see the airplanes better, and that’s how it evolved using the towers so that there was greater visibility also from the ground. You could actually see the airplanes farther out and communicate with them what the intentions would be.

00:11:10

SM:     Thank you for tuning into this episode of The Flight Deck, the podcast of The Museum of Flight in Seattle, Washington. This was part one of my chat with Helen. In part two, which we will release sometime in the near future, she talks about some of the more specific events and incidents that drove the development of air traffic control. It’s really interesting stuff. I cannot way to share it with you.

Helen is a docent on Monday mornings, so if you want to hear these stories from her directly, stop by the museum on a Monday. And speaking of upcoming episodes, if you are a particularly observant listener, you may have noticed that the past few episodes have focused more on air topics as opposed to alternating between air and space topics, which has been kind of our mortise operandi here. And that’s because we’re preparing for this summer. Seattle’s Summer of Space where we’re going to be celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission. So we’ll be focusing much more on space content in those months, and I wanted to make sure that we didn’t leave the av geeks in the dust while we’re talking about space over the summer.

And speaking of av geeks, check out episode 539 of The Airplane Geek’s Podcast featuring Museum of Flight docent Thomas Gray who was part of the first flight test team for the Boeing-747. He talks about what it was like to design and analyze the tests for that iconic aircraft, what it was like to really work on the aircraft at all. Interesting.

00:12:58

And thank you to The Airplane Geek’s team for letting him and I make a guest appearance on their podcast. It is definitely an enthusiast’s podcast, so if you really like airplanes, if you know the jargon, and you just want to delve more into that world, The Airplane Geek’s Podcast is a really good one to check out.

Now I have said a lot of words in this outro, so I’ll try to wrap it up here. If you like what you heard, please rate the podcast on iTunes, Apple Podcast or wherever you downloaded us from. You can contact the show at podcast@museumofflight.org, and you can find links to some of the stuff I’ve mentioned on our website, www.museumofflight.org/podcast. Until next time, this is your host Sean Mobley saying to everyone out there on that good earth, we’ll see you out there, folks.

END OF PODCAST