GETTING THE PICTURE

Roger, that appears to be jet traffic off your right now, three
oclock, at one mile, northeast bound.
WILLIAM L. SMITH, DEC. 16, 1960

Well, Jackie, we got to the end of the road. Its all over now.
MIKE ROCK, AUG. 4, 1981

It was a warm, sunlit August morning in 1981. But as he awoke from a restless nights sleep at his home in Aiken, South Carolina, retired air traffic controller Jack Mahers thoughts turned once again to a cold, gray December day in New York more than twenty years earlier, replaying an event that had haunted his dreams ever since.

Fog and low clouds had shrouded the New York City skyline on Friday morning, December 16, 1960. Snow squalls threatened. It was poor flying weather. Even so, New Yorks three major airports, LaGuardia, Newark, and New York Internationalpopularly known as Idlewildwere expected to handle a total of nearly seventeen hundred flights. Later, Maher would only remember two of them: United Airlines Flight 826, a Douglas DC-8 jet, carrying eighty-four people from Chicagos OHare Airport to Idlewild in southeast Queens, and Trans World Airlines (TWA) Flight 266, a four-engine turboprop Lockheed Super Constellation, carrying forty-four people from Dayton and Columbus, Ohio, to LaGuardia Airport, on Flushing Bay at the north end of Queens.

Below, the New York Air Route Traffic Control Center, a facility of the Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) known as New York Center, buzzed with a murmur that betrayed the faintest hint of strain. Tucked away in Hangar 11 at Idlewild, Maher was among the dozens of air traffic controllers talking crisply into radio transmitters, placing or answering calls on telephones connected directly to the control towers at Idlewild, LaGuardia, and Newark airports, or to the control centers housed in similar hangars at airports in Boston, Cleveland, and Washington. The hangar floor was divided into sectors. Radar scopes tracked arrivals, departures, and over flights within an eighty-mile radius of the airport. The controllers who worked the radar screens were responsible for all traffic operating on instrument flight rules (IFR) within range of their scopes. As they toiled in their regulation white shirts, top buttons undone and ties loosened, World War IIvintage flat radar screens lit their faces with a green glow. Packs of cigarettes rested in their front pockets and coffee cups sat nearby, but the controllers had no time for breaks on this morning. It was not yet 10:30 a.m., but on days like this, with such bad weather, controllers lost all sense of time. More than one hundred flights were taking off or landing at Idlewild, LaGuardia, and Newark each hour. With poor visibility and a cloud ceiling at just six hundred feet, controllers were acting as the pilots eyes, keeping aircraft separated and on their proper course.