The color pictures and charts that begin on the opposite page tell the remarkable story of a jetliner's nonstop flight across the U.S. Oddly enough, one of the remarkable things about the flight was that it was not remarkable at all. The TWA 707 took off from Los Angeles International Airport, soared smoothly across the nation, landed at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport. No hitches, no nervous moments, no bother. And therein lies an even more remarkable story—a story that involves 14,000 highly trained and dedicated men who work with some of the most complex and sophisticated electronic apparatus ever devised.
Even before Flight 740 began taxiing toward the runway at Los Angeles, it was under the surveillance and guidance of the Federal Aviation Agency. Careful eyes watched the plane turn at the end of the runway, poise, and then reach for the sky. Flight 740 then became a bright, moving blip on a succession of FAA radarscopes as it was guided along a transcontinental airway.
Golden Triangle. The route taken by Flight 740 is only one segment of the FAA's 350,000-mile network of federal airways, freeways of the sky that are complete with aerial versions of warning signs, access roads, directional guides and even parking places—the holding areas in the vicinity of busy airports. With the help of ground controllers, pilots navigate from point to point along these invisible airways by means of electronic navigational aids that provide course, distance and location information. These "navaids" range from small location-marker beacons on the ground that light a bulb on the aircraft's instrument panel as it passes overhead, to huge, long-range radar systems that track aircraft and are linked to distant air-traffic control centers by microwave.
Like the highways below them, the nation's airways are becoming increasingly congested. At any moment during daylight hours, the FAA estimates, there are between 8,000 and 9,000 planes aloft in the U.S. airspace, as many as 4,000 of them in the "Golden Triangle," formed by lines connecting Chicago, New York and Washington. With 1,000 new planes a month being added to the nation's aircraft population, the traffic jams are becoming increasingly heavy—both in the sky and at airports. Of the 9,500 U.S. airports, only 114 can handle jets. And although the FAA estimates that the number of jet airports will increase to 346 by 1970 and to more than 500 by 1975, their added capacity will not fully relieve the growing pressure or end the flight delays at such busy fields as Chicago's O'Hare, Los Angeles' International and New York's John F. Kennedy airports.
Over the next decade, the agency estimates, landings and takeoffs at airports controlled by FAA towers will triple—from more than 41 million in 1966 to 139 million. During the same interval, the annual number of flights by instrument rules will grow from 5.2 million to 12.4 million. The number of U.S. commercial airliners will increase from 2,124 to 3,500. Airline business will soar from 114 million passengers and 76 billion passenger-miles in 1966 to 352 million passengers and 266 billion passenger-miles in 1977. The general aviation fleet of business and pleasure craft will increase from 95,442 to 180,000.