Commentary: News helicopters are very L.A. It’s a dangerous job

They’re as far away as a couple of thousand feet over your head, and as close as your radio and cellphone.

They were aloft before GPS, before Waze and Google Maps, and they still are.

Where, literally, would Angelenos be without the flying eyes that guide us to our destinations through our traffic mangles and bring us close to mayhem, riot and fire?

Their work became the story Tuesday when the two people in an NBC4 news helicopter died after it crashed and burst into flames in Chatsworth, not far from the story they were heading to cover: an SUV had plowed into a bus, killing two. One person on the ground also died in the helicopter crash.

Los Angeles and airborne reporting were always a match made, if not in heaven, then a quarter-mile or so closer to it than the rest of us earthbound beings.

Kelly Lange worked for several years as an airborne radio traffic reporter before becoming a groundbreaking female nightly news anchor for the NBC station here and a guest host for the NBC network. She is a friend, and I called her Tuesday to hear her reflections on the work, and her onetime colleagues.

“It’s such a dangerous job, really,” she told me and described some of her close calls. “I’m amazed I lived through it.”

New York City claims the earliest aerial traffic report, in the summer of 1935, by a police commander who monitored the weekend flow of Fords from a Goodyear blimp. Car radios were still uncommon, but one afternoon, the airborne commander spent 20 minutes chewing out a Sunday driver he saw weaving and dodging through a traffic jam in Queens. He described the car and then boomed out his order over the airwaves, “Don’t be so hasty there. … Don’t crowd!”

A KNX announcer and sports reporter named Tom Hanlon is said to have reported L.A. traffic patterns from a United Airlines plane two years later, in August 1937, when weekend drivers overpowered roads en route to beaches and mountain retreats.

One of the earliest to take to the air and the airwaves regularly in Southern California was also the first to die in that duty: Captain Max.

Max Schumacher was a Marine combat pilot in the Korean War. During the Christmas holiday in 1957, he and a radio reporter flew a Bell helicopter for KABC radio, delivering news and traffic updates every 20 minutes or so.

Listeners loved it and came to depend on it. From his “Airwatch” pilot seat, Captain Max guided Angelenos through their traffic tangles, and more. He helped rescue people trapped in the Baldwin Hills dam collapse and helped police track fleeing criminals — just the way present-day news pilots do.

“Watch your driving, folks,” he would tell the lookie-loos, “and leave the accidents to us.”

His high-tech resource was the bulky but immensely helpful Thomas Bros. guide to the streets and highways of Southern California.

In July 1958, engine failure not long after takeoff forced him to the ground. He headed toward a schoolyard but when he spotted kids, he swerved and crash-landed into a tree. The reporter who was with him never flew again, and Captain Max ended up with a gallant-looking limp.

His new station, KMPC, published a comic book about his derring-do, “The True Adventures of Capt. Max.” The cover showed him valiantly at the controls, flames leaping toward the landing skids, with a description of him flying over “searing forest fires, over raging flood waters … to aid the police, the fire department, and the people of Los Angeles.”

Schumacher was flying toward Dodger Stadium on Aug. 30, 1966, looking for someone supposedly firing a gun nearby. So too was his friend LAPD helicopter pilot Alex N. Ilnicki.

The two men often kept in touch about their sorties, but not this time. Their Bell helicopters collided midair, sending flaming wreckage above the heads of horrified drivers on the Pasadena Freeway. Schumacher’s Thomas Bros. guide was found in the wreckage.

The pilots and three passengers were killed. The National Transportation Safety Board concluded that sun glare had blinded both pilots. In the wake of the crash, the Professional Helicopter Pilots Assn., now nicknamed SoCal Rotors, was formed.

Americans in the 1960s knew Francis Gary Powers as the CIA pilot of a secret U-2 spy plane shot down in 1960 over Soviet Russia, who was exchanged in a prisoner swap in 1962, during the peak of the Cold War.

In the 1970s, Angelenos came to know Powers as an aerial traffic pilot. He had worked briefly as a Lockheed test pilot before flying a plane for KGIL radio and then a helicopter for KNBC news.

The wreckage of a television news helicopter piloted by Francis Gary Powers lies in a field in Los Angeles on Aug. 1, 1977. Powers and another newsperson were killed while on assignment for local station KNBC.

(Nick Ut / Associated Press)

Around midday on Monday, Aug. 1, 1977, his KNBC news helicopter crashed in a field at the Sepulveda Dam recreation area in Encino. Powers and cameraman George Spears were killed. Police said Powers may have deliberately brought his plane down where he did to avoid kids playing softball nearby.

The National Transportation Safety Board concluded that the crash was caused by “needless mismanagement of fuel.”

But Lange remembers the crash and the likely reason for it.

“He was brand new with us and we trained him on helicopter,” she said. “He’d flown to Santa Barbara covering a fire, and he had the tape and was in a hurry to get it back in time” for the newscast.

“He had low gas but made the decision that he had enough to get back,” she continued. “But he didn’t remember how loaded our helicopter was with equipment, and it was much, much heavier than he thought.”

Early in the morning of June 4, 1986, at the Fullerton airport, Bruce Wayne, KFI radio’s veteran “Eye in the Sky,” took off in his blue and white Cessna. It crashed.

His wife, Lois, stoically drove to the site and spent more than two hours on the air with KFI talking about the accident and her husband.

Wayne had been Bruce Alford, Boston’s first flying traffic reporter, in 1961. When he moved to California, he changed his name in homage to the “Batman” character he admired.

NTSB investigators couldn’t fix an exact cause for the crash. They found some compression loss in an engine cylinder, and that Wayne had a blood alcohol level of 0.04, the FAA level for legal intoxication. Lois Wayne said he had had two glasses of wine the night before and was in bed by 9 p.m. Wayne also had serious hypertension problems.

KFI asked listeners to turn on their car headlights that day in tribute.

Lange was hired in 1967 as “Dawn O’Day,” the morning traffic reporter for KABC radio. A Los Angeles Times magazine article described her as an “ash-blonde nymph.”

The sky was a frontier, and a macho one. Even though she was reporting on the radio, Lange had to dress in a girdle-tight silver catsuit and silver boots, with a big round patch over her left breast reading “KABC Ladybirds.” The suit added a glamour factor for bigwig sponsors who would sometimes ride along.

On her first day on the job, Lange was hazed by a fellow traffic reporter, who told her about a big accident on the 405 Freeway at Wilshire Boulevard. En route, Lange kept warning listeners about it. But when she got there, “there was nothing.”

The voice of the colleague who pranked her came back into her headphones. “See, Ladybird, you should have stayed in the kitchen.”

The skies had an element of free-for-all then.

“We’d fly out of Whiteman air park [in Pacoima] back then, and they didn’t have a [traffic control] tower,” she said. “The only way we could land is by watching the shadows on the ground to see if any other planes were coming in or going out.

“I’m amazed I lived through it.”

The incident that prompted her to quit flying — and turn down more offers to stay aloft — happened in a fixed-wing plane.

Lange said her pilot had to dodge another plane coming at them, performed a “flip” and was able to set down at Van Nuys Airport. He was shaken and crying. Lange marched into the terminal.

“I called my KABC radio boss at home and told him I had to resign,” she recalled. “He said, ‘Why?’ and I told him. He said, ‘When?’ and I looked at my watch and said, ‘Six minutes ago.’”

One traffic and news pilot, Captain Max’s successor Jim Hicklin, was killed more or less in the line of duty. Lange had been getting scurrilous letters that Hicklin and other aerial reporters were also receiving, from a man accusing them — but Hicklin in particular — of buzzing his house incessantly and of committing “moral offenses.”

She dumped hers in the trash. Hicklin made the mistake of answering, telling the man to stop. In April 1973, the city was pursuing misdemeanor charges against the sender, and Hicklin had been warned off appearing on a KMPC Christmas parade float because someone had threatened to shoot him.

That month, Hicklin announced on the air the details of a cruise he and his wife were taking. The letter writer boarded the cruise ship and fatally shot Hicklin in the head.

Aerial reporters possess a peculiar intimacy with listeners, their voices and visuals filling cars and houses with their personalities as well as useful, even startling, real-time information. In 1994, the New Yorker printed a piece headlined “Hot Pursuit” about this breed of journalists.

It centered on the work of aerial reporters Marika and Zoey Tur, who had tracked O.J. Simpson’s white Bronco along its slow-speed freeway escape. From about 75 feet above Florence and Normandie avenues during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, they broadcast live the shocking images of a truck driver yanked from his cab and being beaten nearly to death by angry residents.

The writer described the singularly Los Angeles role of such people, working in this “spread-out, skyscraperless city where perpetual rush hours thwart would-be roving reporters.”