His Career Is Up in the Air : Bruce Wayne has seen all, told all in 25 years as traffic monitor

The butterscotch and white single-engine Cessna Cardinal taxied onto the runway at Fullerton Airport. It was 3:50 in the afternoon,and Bruce Wayne, the jovial dean of Los Angeles flying traffic reporters, was beginning the second phase of his work day.

Wayne and his plane, dubbed the “Spruce Bruce” by one of his listeners, already had put in three hours in the air that morning, keeping work-bound commuters listening to KFI-AM and KOST-FM informed about traffic conditions on the 636 miles of freeways in Orange and Los Angeles counties.

And now, as commuters began heading home from work, Wayne was back on the job.

Taking off toward the smog-obscured setting sun, Wayne explained that he usually flies over Orange County’s freeways before heading into Los Angeles County. But, as often happens, he already had picked up several traffic incidents over his Highway Patrol scanner, including a major mishap on the southbound Santa Ana Freeway near Atlantic Boulevard in Los Angeles County.

Climbing to about 1,400 feet, Wayne headed up the Santa Ana Freeway to investigate.

A few minutes later, over the City of Commerce, he saw it: an accident involving several cars and a truck. It had blocked all but the left southbound lane. Not only was southbound traffic backed up for several miles, but northbound traffic was bumper-to-bumper.

“That’s what I call ‘spectator slowing,’ ” Wayne said with a grin as he jotted down traffic notes onto a clipboard on his lap.

At 4:04, flying over the San Bernardino Freeway, Wayne delivered his first traffic report of the afternoon, on KFI.

“Good afternoon, we’re out here under hazy skies . . .,” he began, ending with his trademark, “Before you hit the on-ramp, push the traffic button, KFI 640. Bruce Wayne, KFI in the sky.”

And so it went for the next two hours, with Wayne doing his eight-times-an-hour traffic reports (which typically include bantering with the on-air personalities) and listening to his aircraft radio, two AM/FM radios, the highway patrol scanner and the two-way radio that provides his communication link to the radio stations--all the while scanning the freeways below and watching out for other aircraft.

Wayne, however, makes this mid-air balancing act look surprisingly easy.

“Well,” he said above the drone of the airplane, “it’s work, but I make it look easy because I’ve been doing it so long.”

Indeed, next July marks Wayne’s 25th anniversary as a flying traffic reporter.

With nine years’ experience in radio and television (and flying lessons courtesy the GI Bill) behind him, Wayne was enlisted in 1961 by radio station WHDH to become Boston’s first--and, he believes, the nation’s third--flying traffic reporter.

“We were pioneers,” recalled Wayne during an interview at his home in Fullerton, where the Waynes have lived for 14 years. “When I went on the air on July 4, 1961, I had never even heard an air traffic report.”

Today, most major cities have at least one airborne traffic reporter--Los Angeles currently has six, four of whom do their own flying--but no one has been at it as long as Wayne, who has been a pilot-reporter for KFI for 15 years and who was honored last year when Mayor Tom Bradley proclaimed Aug. 14 “Bruce Wayne Day” in Los Angeles.

Wayne, who reports from 6 to 9 a.m. and from 4 to 6 p.m. five days a week, keeps motorists posted on everything from minor fender benders to major mishaps.

Among the more dramatic traffic stories Wayne has reported over the years are a 130-car pileup in a fog bank in Corona, an overturned tanker truck on the Ventura Freeway that became “a huge flaming torch” and tied up traffic for hours, and what he refers to as possibly “the worst single freeway disaster in the history of Los Angeles”--the 1971 Sylmar earthquake, which caused numerous freeway overpasses in the San Fernando Valley to collapse.

In fact, when floods, fires, mud slides and other natural disasters strike the Southland, it’s not unusual for Wayne to put in up to 13 hours a day doing spot news coverage. In the process, as part of the KFI news team, Wayne has helped the station win several reporting awards over the years.

But although he takes his flying and traffic reporting seriously, the affable Wayne is not without his whimsical touch. (He did, after all, change his real name, Bruce Talford, to Bruce Wayne after moving from Boston to California in 1966. “Talford is not really a good radio name,” he explained. “The ‘Batman’ TV show was highly popular, and I thought I could have a lot of fun with that, being a ‘flying caped crusader.’ ”)

Outrageous Moments

Bored with the light traffic on New Year’s morning, Wayne two years ago began doing his New Year’s Day morning traffic reports from a hot-air balloon tethered next to the Rose Parade route. But his most outrageous radio moments occurred in the ‘70s during disc jockey “Sweet Dick” Whittington’s tenure at KFI. With Wayne piloting, they:

Flew over Mt. Baldy, making an air drop of human hair sent in by listeners so the “bald” mountain would look better; “got the red out” of Redlands by dropping a bottle of Visine over the city and “married” the Queen Mary to the Prince of Long Beach, a harbor cruise boat.

And then there was the real-life airborne wedding Whittington arranged for live broadcast in which the bride and groom flew with Wayne in the KFI airplane, which was followed by a fleet of five other aircraft carrying the minister, the best man, the maid of honor and the bridesmaids. Pulling up the rear was accordionist Florian Zabach.

As Wayne observed, Whittington “was the best promotion-minded personality I ever worked with.”

‘Fastest-Breaking News’

Despite the occasional publicity stunts and joking with on-air personalities such as KFI’s comical morning duo, Lohman and Barkley, Wayne views his role on the radio as “primarily a news reporter because, after all, the traffic is the fastest-breaking news we have day in and day out. Over the years I’ve developed a radio personality to go along with the reports, which lightens up the bad information a little bit and also includes me in the actual show.”

But, Wayne said: “The primary thing I’m doing is helping them (motorists) to avoid a serious problem, and I can give people alternate routes that can save them anywhere from minutes to hours in their commute.

“A minor function is letting people know what the trouble is up ahead. Many times I’ve been driving on a freeway, and you come into a wall of traffic. If you don’t have a traffic reporter to tell you what’s going on, you don’t know if you have one mile or 10 miles of congestion ahead. I think it actually relieves the stress of commuters by giving them a more accurate picture of what’s going on.”

For Wayne, the work day begins at 4:30 a.m. when he wakes up and immediately starts checking the traffic situation on a police scanner in his den. He also phones the FAA flight service station for a weather briefing. He will not fly illegally when the weather prevents it, he says, “but I want to be up as much as possible.”

By 5:45, Wayne is at Fullerton Airport four miles away. It is, he duly notes with a grin, “a 10-minute drive, and I never get on a freeway.”

Does Two Reports

After doing his pre-flight inspection, he’s in the air a few minutes before 6 and on the air with his first traffic report on KFI at about 6:04. That done, he immediately changes his radio frequency to KOST FM--both stations are owned by Cox Broadcasting Corp.--and does another traffic report at 6:08.

“I bounce back and forth all morning long until my final report, which is 10 minutes after 9 on KOST,” he said. “I have maybe six minutes between reports to gather traffic information and check with other aircraft and control towers, so it’s a tremendously hectic period of time.”

He keeps his traffic reports fresh by listening to his California Highway Patrol scanner, in addition to picking up information from police, fire departments and other traffic reporters over his aircraft radio. “I feel,” he noted, “that any traffic reporter who does not listen to the others is not doing as good a job as he could.”

As Wayne sees it, there are several advantages to doing traffic reports from the air rather than from a studio.

“The most important thing is when traffic information is reaching you second or third hand, there is a much greater chance of error,” he said. “Secondly (in the air), you have the opportunity of not only looking at the accident and seeing how far traffic is backed up, but you can also scout alternate routes.”

Wayne is back home by 9:45 a.m. He has breakfast, tapes his daily report of Caltrans’ road closures for KFI and tries to do something physical, usually a game of tennis, to compensate for spending six hours a day sitting in a space so cramped that he can’t even cross his legs.

By 3:45 in the afternoon, he’s back at the airport, and the process starts over again until his final report of the day at 6:20.

After nearly 25 years, Wayne said, he still finds the job enjoyable. “It’s very rewarding, but it’s darn difficult. It really is.”

Indeed, although it’s easy for anyone who has ever been stalled in bumper-to-bumper rush-hour traffic to envy the seemingly carefree traffic reporter flying above it all, Wayne says his six hours a day in the sky over Los Angeles and Orange counties are far from stress free.

Three Jobs in One

As Wayne points out, being a flying traffic reporter is not one but three jobs: “I am,” he said, “a pilot, traffic reporter and radio personality.” And each job, he said, has its own built-in stress factors.

As a pilot, Wayne said, he is flying six hours--700 to 800 miles--a day in what is considered the busiest air space in the nation. He logs about 120 flying hours a month; an airline pilot, by comparison, is restricted by law to a maximum of 80 hours a month.

He also must deal with the weather. Wayne has flown in winds so high that he literally bumped his head on the roof of his plane. It also can get hot in his non-air-conditioned plane. The usually mild-mannered pilot once came home and tossed something on the kitchen table, saying to his wife, Lois, “This broke today.” It was a thermometer from the cabin of his plane; it only registered up to 120 degrees.

‘Sense of Cooperation’

Another continual stress while flying, he said, is that he must watch out for other aircraft, including the five other Los Angeles flying traffic reporters. As a margin of safety, he said, the traffic reporters always fly on the right side of a freeway. “There’s a sense of cooperation,” he noted. “We work together, talking back and forth and giving position reports.”

Then there’s his airplane. “It is mechanical, and airplanes do develop problems. If a mechanic makes a mistake, I’ve got a crash on my hands,” he said, noting that he considers his own mechanic of 15 years “the best.”

Another stress factor not many people consider, Wayne said, is that pilots must undergo an annual FAA physical exam by a flight surgeon and “if you don’t pass it, it’s the end of your flying career.”

As a broadcaster, Wayne said, he is working in the most competitive radio outlet in the country. Wayne, who has been doing traffic reports for KFI since 1970, also began reporting for KOST in 1978.

Although that doubled the amount of on-air work he does during his daily six hours of flying, he said, “the split shift is really what gets to you. Let’s face it, how many people do you know that go to work 10 times a week?”

Another part of the job stress, Wayne said, is that he and his wife, Lois, don’t have much of a social life.

Early to Bed

In order to get up by 4:30 a.m., Wayne is usually in bed by 8:30 at night. With a laugh, he noted: “I’m one of the few people who can go to Las Vegas and be in bed at 10 at night.”

“The other stress and pressure I have is the longevity,” he said. “I’ve been a broadcaster 33 years, but the stressful part is the almost 25 years in the air, and I’ve never had an accident as a pilot.”

He qualifies that with “as a pilot” because he was involved in a helicopter crash--as a passenger--while covering traffic in Boston in 1964.

Wayne, who had broken his leg skiing, was flying with a substitute pilot who, Wayne later learned, was totally unfamiliar with this type of helicopter.

About 50 feet in the air and 200 feet out over Boston Harbor, the pilot lost control of the helicopter, and it plunged into the water. Wayne and the pilot managed to open a door and escape before the chopper sank. The pilot took off swimming and, said Wayne: “I swam 200 feet to shore with a full-length cast on my leg. I was so panicked I didn’t even feel the cold.”

Rescue Attempt Misfires

The near-tragedy was not without its Lohman and Barkley-esque twist, however. In an attempt to rescue Wayne and the pilot, three men who witnessed the crash from a boat repair yard next to the heliport threw a rowboat into the water and jumped in. Laughed Wayne: “What they didn’t know, was the boat was in for repairs for a bad leak and the boat sank.”

Despite the stresses and pressures that come with the job, Wayne manages to stay as cool and good-humored as he appears on the air.

“I wouldn’t have lasted this long if I weren’t a basically laid-back person who didn’t get upset by things,” he said. “The hyper ones don’t last very long.”

And, he acknowledged, a sense of humor comes in handy.

“One thing that’s aided my survival is I’ve been able to work with Lohman and Barkley 15 years,” he said. “Working with them is like an old pair of slippers now: very, very comfortable.”

“It’s interesting to be working with a man you never see; we’re looking forward to meeting him someday,” deadpanned Roger Barkley when asked about Lohman and Barkley’s professional relationship with Wayne.

‘An Amazing Guy’

“No, he’s an amazing guy,” Barkley said. “We’ve always marveled at his ability to monitor all those radios he has up there, fly an airplane and observe traffic and still, in the midst of all that, seem to know everything that we’re involved in. He’s a one-man band up there, really.”

“When I think of Bruce Wayne, I think of the word professional,” said Chuck Street of Seal Beach, who does flying traffic reports for KISS AM/FM and who describes himself as “just a cub compared to Bruce.”

“Anybody who can be in the profession as long as he has, fly as many hours in all kinds of weather conditions in the busiest air space in probably the world, be as smooth and professional on the air--and not hit anyone else--you’ve got to take your hat off to,” said Street.

In 1982, for her husband’s 30th anniversary in broadcasting, Lois Wayne surprised Bruce with a “fly-by” during his afternoon broadcast.

Flying off to the side of Wayne’s plane the entire afternoon were five airplanes, including a World War I Fokker triplane replica, a World War II Mustang and an aerobatic plane flown by the late stunt pilot Art Scholl trailing red, white and blue smoke. At the end of Wayne’s final traffic report, 5,000 balloons were released from the deck of the Queen Mary.

“It was a wild thing to see, I’ll tell you,” said Wayne, who has, over the years, piloted the Goodyear Blimp (“I’ve actually got 30 minutes of blimp time in my pilot’s log book”), flown with the Blue Angels in the back seat of a trainer (“I’ve got to tell you, that was as close to becoming air sick as I’ve come in the last 25 years”) and rode on the wing of Art Scholl’s biplane (“He actually did loops and rolls”).

Journalist-in-Space Candidate

Last week, Wayne joined Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor and Tom Brokaw--and several hundred other professional journalists--in meeting the deadline for NASA’s Journalist-in-Space Project, in which one lucky journalist will be chosen to fly on a space shuttle mission next fall.

To even be considered for the honor of being the first journalist in space is, of course, a thrilling way to celebrate 25 years as a flying traffic reporter, Wayne notes.

But he already has more earth-bound plans for his Silver Anniversary on the 4th of July. In the same promotion-minded way he now covers New Year’s Day traffic from a hot-air balloon, Wayne and his wife--along with a group of KFI contest winners--will be flown to New York City, where they will have VIP tickets for the unveiling of the restored Statue of Liberty.

Although Wayne is looking forward to his 25th anniversary, he said the most satisfying moment of his career occurred during a celebrity tennis tournament when a woman and her daughter walked up to him and asked if he used to be Bruce Talford, the flying traffic reporter back in Boston.

Tears came into the woman’s eyes when Wayne said he was. She threw her arms around him and hugged him, saying he was responsible for saving the lives of her entire family.

The woman explained that her husband was driving her and her children into a blinding sunset one afternoon when they heard Wayne report that a truck had overturned in the high speed lane. “My God, that’s our lane,” her husband had said, as he swerved and missed the truck by about 100 feet.

“That’s the reward,” Wayne said. “Those are things that really make it worthwhile.”