‘What’s So Important Out There?’

Amid the death rattle of summer 1966, I sat at my school desk near an open window, gazing at a small airplane crawling across the New Jersey sky. Type unknown, its shape and color were muted against the battleship gray overcast. Back-to-school heat had dulled all colors from my world and crushed memories of being on vacation and free to ride my bicycle to Ramapo Valley Airport (RVA) in nearby New York.

Once there, I’d explore the rows of airplanes and open hangars, looking without touching, inhaling the heady aromas of avgas and doped fabric on the Cubs, Champs, and Tri-Pacers while avoiding adults who might yell, “Hey, kid, get outta there!” But no one ever did. Ramapo airport was my sanctuary. I didn’t fly; no one in my family did. I suspected I was the only one in the classroom aware that there was a flying machine outside the window with a pilot unencumbered by my self-pity and able to drift across trees and mountains to wherever whimsy beaconed.

And that’s when I heard the voice, a siren’s call, not from a passing cop car but from Greek mythology, sweet but deadly tones to lure daydreaming sailors to their doom. (Yeah, I’d watched Jason and Argonauts that summer.) Now, she was enticing me to leave the classroom and fly, so I strained to hear a woman’s voice call in a not so alluring tone, “Mister Berge ….”

Uh-oh.

This siren wore nun’s robes, dusted with white chalk from conjugating irregular verbs with merciless ferocity on the blackboard, which was green. My head swiveled like a B-17’s upper gun turret, while my eyes remained locked on the passing airplane for as long as peripherally feasible. When my gaze met Sister Mary Camden’s she posed the Riddle of the Sphinx: “Is what’s in the sky more important than what’s in here?”

Being 12, I knew there was no right answer. My thought, “Yes, watching airplanes is better than anything inside a stuffy classroom,” meant certain death, leaving the only acceptable reply a mumbled, “No, sister.” Although a safe answer that might prolong my life until Thanksgiving, it was a lie, and lying to a nun before lunch was uncharted moral territory. Outwardly penitent, I looked down at my new hush puppies, but as the teacher turned back to the board and chalk exploded on the past participle of lie—lied!—I glanced outside, but my airplane vision had faded.

Someone who knows little once said, “There are no do-overs in life.” Perhaps, but there are plenty of do-betters, as in, “Your takeoff sucked, Wilbur, let me try.” And so years passed, and I learned to fly while stationed in Hawaii, then because no one had fact-checked my college admissions application, I matriculated and in need of a job took the FAA’s ATC entrance exam. And damn if I didn’t get a slot at Oakland Air Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC) in Fremont, California, nowhere near Oakland airport. I’d requested a control tower assignment, but this was a take-it-or-leave-it offer. I took and regretted.

Not that Center was a bad place to work, unless you hated tobacco smoke, which I did but needed the job. The FAA Academy’s ATC program in Oklahoma City was tough but survivable (barely, considering the summer weather). Back again at Oakland I settled in to four years of on-the-job training. People were nice and the money good, but the problem was windows. There weren’t any in the massive control room with four rows of radar displays. The job was challenging, but I longed for windows through which I could gaze at flight. So, I resigned, then reapplied and six months later reported for duty at one of California’s coolest airports, San Jose Reid Hillview
(KRHV).

With parallel 3100-foot runways, several flight schools, including Amelia Reid’s sporting old Taylorcrafts, Cessnas, a Piper Comanche and an Apache for multi-engine training, the traffic pattern was always full. We’d routinely run a hundred ops per hour on a busy VFR day. From the tower we didn’t so much control air traffic but gave the play-by-play. And without radar displays, you looked outside all the time. I loved getting paid to stare out the windows at airplanes.

Fun is great, but soon I heeded another siren’s call and transferred to Monterey, California, Tower and Approach (KMRY). A great place to work with a spectacular view of the bay, this ATC facility combined tower and approach positions inside the tower cab, making it a hermaphrodite TRACAB. Eventually, I tired of vectoring movie and golf celebrities and transferred east to Des Moines International Airport (KDSM) in Iowa (don’t ask), where the radar approach control is in a windowless TRACON seven stories beneath the tower cab. It’s not as confining as Center, because controllers alternate working both upstairs and down. I preferred up, and you know why: I like looking at airplanes.

I’ve since retired from ATC, and Ramapo Valley Airport is long gone, paved over with heartless suburbia, but it remains at the core of my flying life. I don’t know what became of Sister Mary Camden, but I respectfully confess to her memory that I’d lied back then and still believe that what’s in the sky is frequently more important than what those confined to the ground perceive to be important.