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Show A Move For Safer Flying Any businessman or farmer flying his own airplane, and looking for a place to land at night, might not think of the tall corn state of Iowa as a particularly, good nomination but he's wrong. - ' . For Iowa, like Utah, although it has few large cities and big airports, has embarked on a plan to help increasing numbers of flying farmers and business executives by helping small town airports buy and operate all night runway lights. Although it may not appear as front page news, Frank ' Berlin, director of the Iowa Aeronautics Commission, thinks it's a progressive step that other states such as Utah soon may follow fol-low to cut down dangers to small planes flying long stretches between commercial airports at night. "Pilots fly at night with confidence because they know they are within minutes of a lighted runway," says Berlin. One reason is that the state has agreed to pay half of the equipment cost for municipal airports, in satisfactory locations, who will buy and install a runway light kit, and agree to operate the lights from sunset to sunrise. The equipmen, called the "flying fatmer kit," is purchased from one of the leading makers of big city airport lighting. The firm, whose high intensity lights guide four-engine airliners air-liners into Chicago Midway, New Yorg, LaGuardia and Idle-wild, Idle-wild, Boston, Indianapolis, and dozens of other large airports, several years ago made available to farmers the low priced kit with which private or small town runways can be lighted for ' $750 runways 2200 feet long, as an example, can be lighted for $750 compared with $5,000 to $10,000 for other systems. Then the lights, which even Arthur Godfrey has bought for the air strip on his farm, can be operated on current of approximately that 'required for an electric iron on a regular household circuit. In Iowa' 60 airports now have permanent runway lights, and 15 more are eligible to receive help under the state-wide small airport lighting aid plan which went into effect in 1955. On example of how popular the lights have become is at Marshalltown airport where no night landings were made before the do-it-yourself lighting was installed. In the next few months, 74 landings were made after dark, including one emergency set-down. The flying farmer kit also has been ordered by some missionary mis-sionary bush pilot organizations. The firm also reports that, as an index of the value of runway light abroad as well as in this country, when Chinese Nationalist armies retired from the mainland main-land to Formosa, they ripped up and carried away lights from Shanghai's airport and two others, because they figured the Communists Com-munists would have a hard time replacing them. . |
