Up, up and away: The first traffic reporters
My item about the disappearance of airborne traffic reporters on KCBS triggered a flight down memory lane by Fred Krock, the retired announcer, engineer and historian.
“Perhaps your readers would be interested in how airplane traffic reports got started,” he writes. “To get a job with an airline or other commercial employer, a pilot had to have a minimum number of hours of flight time. Some military pilots came out of the service short only a few dozen hours of the required flight time. They would rent an airplane. … So the first airborne traffic reporters were pilots building up their flight time. Radio stations were able to hire them by paying for their airplane rental. Frequently, the pilot would report for several stations using different names for each station.”
As far as Krock can remember, KSFO, KYA, KFRC and his station, classical KKHI, were among the first to get those reports. They weren’t impressive, between engine noise and the student pilots being amateur reporters. As Krock recalls, “Some pilots were not very good at speaking, so report quality suffered. A few pilots learned to be fairly good reporters. Hap Harper is the first one I remember to make a living doing it.” It didn’t hurt that he was on KSFO, where the morning DJ was one Don Sherwood.
Harper, who began in 1957, would remain airborne for 34 years, working with Frank Dill and Mike Cleary on KNBR and with Carter B. Smith and Gene Nelson on KSFO/KYA.
Back to KCBS: Among those who vanished when the station dropped Total Traffic, which provided reporters as well as reports, was Ron Cervi, who reported from his plane, Sky 1, for 29 years — “An amazing experience,” he says.
“I was in Sky 1 during the ’89 Loma Prieta earthquake,” he said by email. “Earthquakes move at about 35 mph, so we were able to look down over Fremont and see the earth rolling (on its way up to Candlestick, the Cypress structure and the Bay Bridge ...). We stayed up as late as possible, but legally had to land by sunset because the power at the airport was out.”
Stan Burford, the Bay Area Radio Hall of Famer who retired in 2012 from KGO, where he logged 28 years in the air, also can’t shake that quake. The next several days, he recalls, he and his pilot flew 16 hours a day around the bay, offering advice to drivers on “how to get from A to B.”
Cervi witnessed other historical moments from above. “I flew over and reported the Oakland firestorm in ’91, the Rodney King riots in ’92 and the 101 California St. shooting in ’93,” he wrote.
“And I (am) told that I was the last plane flying west of the Mississippi on 9/11. We didn't know yet what was happening, so I was over Petaluma when the call came for all planes over the United States to land. They could have forced us to land at the closest airport, but I've built a level of trust with air traffic control, and we were allowed to proceed back to Hayward.
“It’s been an exciting, memorable and fun run,” said Cervi, who’s still with Total Traffic but is grounded for now. “I wouldn't change it for the world.” We shall be released: Live365 is back. That would be the Bay Area company that enabled indie broadcasters to create online radio stations. It tanked early last year, just weeks after I’d launched Moonalice Radio, for the jam band Moonalice. After scrambling for a new platform and distributor, we landed at a European company that offered its services for free, in exchange for four minutes of commercials per hour.
Good deal — except when it wasn’t. Maybe because it’s free, the company offers no customer support. Their tutorial is a foreign language. They write in English, but it’s incomprehensible. If you want any explanation, whether for a feature you can’t execute or an outage, you have to go to a discussion board and hope someone else is dealing with a similar issue.
To program the station, I built playlists for each band member — Roger McNamee, John Molo, Barry Sless and Pete Sears — as well as for my own show, only, too often, to see and hear the software throw songs and voice tracks out of order, and with titles transformed into gibberish.
When I heard from programmer and podcast producer Rae Palermo, who’s worked with the original Live365, that it was making a comeback under new ownership, I got Moonalice Radio onto the wait list. Early this month, Jon Luini of Chime.com, which handles the band’s tech needs, pulled the switch. And here’s the best thing of all: No commercials. That costs the station $79 a month, but to lose those programming and scheduling headaches? Priceless. (We can be found at www.moonalice radio.com or via the band’s site. I’m on from 9 to 12, a.m. and p.m.) R.I.P.: Jim Cranna. Best known as an improvisational comic, dating to the original Committee in the ’60s (Will Durst calls him “the Ferlinghetti of improv”), Mr. Cranna also was the voice of “Dieter Eldotter,” the unscrupulous auto mechanic in a series of Lincoln-Mercury radio commercials, and worked with the Giants, Chevy’s and Round Table Pizza. Mr. Cranna, who died May 4 at age 73, also was a part of the Third Coast Live — Radio Theater company. Mea Kulpa: I wrote that Jack Kulp (of KISQ/”The Breeze”) is in the Bay Area Radio Hall of Fame. He isn’t. Yet. “Fingers crossed,” he says.