“Four-Four-Mike, I’ve been calling you for two minutes!” I was climbing in a Cessna 210 with Jean and two buddies out of Salt Lake City International Airport. Frantically, I apologized for missing the controller’s calls. “There are mountains out there!” he chided. “What if you missed a vector?”
There was little danger, as we were in good visual conditions. But missing radio calls on an instrument flight plan is inexcusable. Why such a blunder? While another pilot flew, I was attempting to monitor two frequencies while filing a flight plan four hours in advance of our final leg home to Lafayette, Indiana.
Three months earlier—30 years ago this month, in August 1981—President Ronald Reagan had fired 12,000 air traffic controllers in the ugly wake of a strike. With few controllers remaining to rebuild the system, ATC had narrowed its services to airline and military traffic, suspending instrument clearances and flight following for all nonemergency private and corporate aircraft.
To address the crisis, qualified controllers were siphoned from management, flight service, the military, and less-busy facilities. Many smaller control towers closed or drastically reduced their operating hours. This affected cross-country planning, because in those days before automated weather stations, few airports reported weather without an operating control tower.
The staffing shortage primarily affected air route traffic control centers (ARTCC), which primarily handle aircraft between terminal areas. To bypass them, general aviation pilots learned to file instruments via “tower en route.” This meant navigating via hand offs between towers and local approach control facilities—providing their airspace adjoined and all were open. Outside populated areas, of course, this was impossible. Avoiding weather was also a concern, since low flight altitudes and circuitous routes were often necessary to avoid center airspace. Over time, the FAA closed terminal airspace gaps where feasible, raised ceilings, and published tower-en-route listings to expedite traffic.
As staffing improved, the FAA began offering two regular general aviation instrument slots per hour, which could be reserved 24 hours in advance. This development created enough ATC normalcy to prompt my first-ever West Coast journey. My friend, Al, and I—then Purdue University faculty members—had presentations scheduled in Los Angeles; flying ourselves there seemed a worthy adventure. Jean and fellow Purdue Staff Aero Club member, Jerry, agreed to join us.
Launching from Lafayette, we refueled at Hutchinson, Kansas, and savored our first night in old Spanish Santa Fe. This was an exotic destination for Midwesterners coming from a town where ethnic food meant one Chinese restaurant.
Mercifully, the ATC reservation system eased that first travel day, with shorter lead times and more hourly slots. We’d now reserve instrument departure times precisely four hours before every leg. Some onboard wanted to fly under visual flight rules for more flexibility. But outside the desert Southwest, I dared not abandon instrument flight plans on such an extended journey. With “pop-up” instrument clearances prohibited on the fly, only an instrument flight plan every leg could accommodate unexpected weather.
Day two led us among Monument Valley’s crimson buttes and over gold-and-cobalt Lake Powell. This was before the Grand Canyon Special Flight Rules Area, so we dipped below the canyon rim and traced the Colorado River through its gorge. Refueling at Grand Canyon Airport, we emerged over Lake Mead near Las Vegas. We then traversed the Mojave Desert, and maintaining altitude over the Los Angeles Basin to conserve our gliding range, steered west over the Pacific.
Our second night’s destination was gemlike Santa Catalina Island, 22 miles off the Southern California coast. If soaring out to sea was thought-provoking for prairie flatlanders, finding Catalina’s “Airport in the Sky” perched atop a 1,600-foot pinnacle was a shock. Another surprise was receiving landing instructions from unicom rather than a control tower, and yet another was diving toward a mountain on base to Runway 4.
We turned final a bit high, and touched down a little fast. Three thousand feet should be plenty of runway for a Cessna 210, but it looked far shorter than that. Catalina Airport regulars know that among other illusions, a mid-runway crest implies the strip ends much sooner than it does. But we’d consulted no regulars, and the result was hair-raising. What a relief to find more pavement beyond the crest—only to discover that it slopes downhill! We checked our tires for bald spots after touchdown, and then learned at the office that two aircraft had recently run off the end; one had not yet been removed. Since then, I always research new-to-me mountain airports before landing there.
After sightseeing the next morning, we hopped to Burbank for our meeting. Four days later we flew the rugged California coastline to San Jose to visit friends. Then came a casino stop at Reno, Nevada, before overnighting at Salt Lake City—where I got bawled out on departure for missing the radio call. We refueled at Grand Island, Nebraska, and flew my zealously filed instrument flight plan home to Lafayette.
Fortunately, ATC’s post-strike restrictions faded within a year. Yet they figure prominently in the lessons and landmarks of that long-ago cross-country odyssey, through the Grand Canyon to Catalina’s “Airport in the Sky.”
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