Long-time staffer Harvey Hauptman describes it this way: Someone at CBS must have thought the lame notion to name the pilots after the two aviation pioneers a clever idea in the days before the station switched to all news in the summer of 1967. WCBS Radio's chopper fleet dates back to "Wilbur and Orville." No, not the Wilbur and Orville, the Wright brothers, but two flying traffic reporters dubbed Wilbur and Orville, one spotting traffic on Manhattan's West Side and New Jersey, the other the East Side and Long Island. I valued each and every partner and thank them to this day. There was a lot to learn, and in the end, what could be better. Each partnership was different and so too the balance of the working relationship. Over the years I worked with many different co-anchors at different schedules on the air. It could be meeting the scheduled time to play commercials, pre-recorded or those we had to read live for sponsored feature programs, and the inevitable network join, precisely on the hour, or at other join times throughout the hour. But never at the cost of missing what the clock demanded. You'd read through it all and type out headlines and scripts for air on your manual typewriter, all overseen by the executive producer, who, when a story would break would often run the length of the typewriter room, through two doors to get into the air studio to hand deliver to the anchor, or the reporter sitting near you, to give an update or a bulletin, that could change everything. It offered story after story written by news service reporters. These were pre-computer days, and we first made contact with written news from teletype machines, which chugged along in a really loud incessant way, in a wire room, which every radio station had. You had to keep listening and evaluating. I picked up speed and understanding every day, working alongside an incredible and seasoned news staff, reporters, writers, editors, producers, engineers, the news directors, the sales people, every single person there made an impact, and we all had to monitor the product, what went out over the air. It was at this radio station, in this era, with these people, at just the right time of my development. I don't think this would have happened to me in any other place. If you're any good, nothing sneaks up on you, and you "land in a safe place," every time, to begin the cycle again. The News88 helicopter pilots, Neal Busch and Lou Timolat, called it "situational awareness" as the engine runs. It's both very hard and inexplicably rewarding, this 360 degree awareness. The clock was the master, and the mission was keeping the radio audience running with you, wide open to the voices and sounds that convey an endless road of information and thoughts that have impact on their world. Within that learning curve was a thinking work cycle you lived by, survived by: a sequence of what just happened, what to make sure to remember from it, while maneuvering within the parameters of what is happening now, and preparing in the back of your mind for what's coming up, and fast. You had to step on the conveyer belt and hold on and contribute. But here, at News88, an intense place of information and traffic, both on the ground and in the air, there were people all around who could teach you by example as well as what was simply required of you. I was used to the limits that people placed on me. In the early 1970s I was hired as the first woman anchor at WCBS News Radio. W orking in news, particularly in live radio news, especially in the way it used to exist in the early 1970s, you discovered every day how much more you are capable of learning and executing, more than you would have ever thought possible, and it surprises you in a very exciting way. As a licensed pilot herself, who once headed public affairs for the Eastern Region of the FAA out of JFK, who better than Rita to tell both the helicopter story and her own? -DS In the fourteen years in which she anchored at WCBS, including afternoon drive with the likes of Tom Franklin, Gary Maurer, and Harvey Hauptman, Rita Sands got to know the station's chopper pilots, both on and off the air.
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