(See Cover) To fly without feathers is not easy.
— Plautus (254?-184 B.C.) In his exalted soaring into the unforgiving air, man in his bird has reaped all the riches he ever dreamed of — the poetry of flight itself and the victory over time and space. But in the swift tumble of progress called the Air Age, he has wrought more hard truth than poetry. The truth: the skies over the U.S. — busiest of all air borne nations — are roaring with an astonishing complex of featherless birds. Not counting 22,000 military aircraft, there are operating in the U.S. no fewer than 72,000 planes, ranging from lightweight, single-engined private craft to 295,000-lb., jet-driven, kerosene-guzzling monsters. A dozen planes take off and land every minute at the 567 U.S. airports that the air lines serve; and these airlines alone carry 152,300 passengers more than 2,200,000 miles a day.
The air they inhabit is a bulging bundle of nerves, a webwork of highways that crisscross for 220,000 miles in all directions, including ever-higher altitudes. Moreover, the dawn of the commercial jet age — with 94 jet transports already in U.S. airline service, and about 150 more due by year's end — with its near sonic speeds and bigger loads, has compounded all of the vast problems of the Air Age with unparalleled force.
Clear Space. The enormous cocoon of safety with which the U.S. has wrapped the Air Age is as complex as the problems of flight itself. Hunched over green-glowing radarscopes in 35 stations across the nation stand ARTC (Air Route Traffic Control) men, who follow and guide airplanes flying through heavy weather or at sky-streaking altitudes on Instrument Flight Rules. Moving their transparent markers ("shrimp boats") alongside little blips, they warn of nearby traffic, give directions, order changes in headings and altitudes. If a plane is a 550-m.p.h. jet, the controller gives the pilot 100 miles' clear space ahead, 100 behind; prop-driven planes get 35 miles. Through controllers and towers, miles of Teletype wire and a host of electronic machines, schedules are juggled, flights shifted, with split-second decision and never-ending attention to detail.
In the cockpits are more of the wrappings of the cocoon: rigorously trained pilots with computers for brains and steel for nerves, whose proficiency is checked by the clock and whose mistakes—even minor ones—are costly. The planes they fly are machines of infinite precision, built and maintained and double-checked constantly to assure mastery of the laws of physics.
Power. The only measure of success in the air, for people and for airborne industry, is the quality of that wondrously complicated envelope of safety, and the first responsibility for that safety rests in the hands of an organization that, for power and procedure, has no parallel in the U.S. It is the Federal Aviation Agency, and the man who rules it is a temperamental, mail-fisted, blunt-talking ex-fighter pilot named Elwood Ricardo Gonzalo Quesada.