Bartlett Robinson stars as a commercial airline pilot who risks flying in adverse weather conditions to get home be with his wife who is expecting their first child. The flight, from San Francisco to Los Angeles (SFO to LAX in terms of airport designations) will be through significant turbulence that is likely to make some of the passengers nervous. Because of bad weather, air traffic is backing up in the skies to land at Los Angeles. The airport has some fog that is slowing down the landings of flights there. The pilot has a decision to make: does he hold the flight until the weather improves, or does he fly home because of the telegram he received that his wife has gone into labor. Weather continues to deteriorate. There is one passenger who is more nervous than the others, and the fears she is expressing may affect the concerns and attitudes of the other passengers. The plotline is complicated by the presence of some military jets near the LAX flight patterns. The pilot, however, decides to make a selfish move to start descending from 8,000 feet against the directions of the control tower, ostensibly to allow him to land sooner. It’s a strange decision. That’s a problem as the military jets are at 7,000. He finally gets wise to his selfishness and ascends back to this assigned altitude. What came over him? How could he lose control of his focus on his primary obligations for the safety of the innocent passengers, the crew, and the other aircraft in the area? Will his co-pilot stop him?
Not many of the listening audience had ever been on a plane, so they probably accepted every situation in this story at face value. When writers, like Searls, included airplanes in their stories, they could get away with “fudging the facts” to move the stories along. That’s not the case today; writers can’t depend on the lack of personal knowledge of their audience about this subject. It was not until the early 1970s that half of Americans had been on at least one flight. There were about 50 million passenger boardings (many more than once because of business travel) in 1958. That number is about 28% of total population at that time. In 2023, there were about 860 million passenger boardings, about 260% of the total population. About 90% of the US population had flown at least once in their lifetime by 2023. In a single year, about 44% of the US population flies at least once in a particular year.
In modern times, the problems with air traffic congestion depicted in this story are minimized by various procedures. Many of these them were adopted to optimize use of fuel, as it was common for planes to circle airports, sometimes for hours in the worst conditions, before being allowed to land. These “holding patterns” occur less frequently today than in the past because of advances in air traffic control technology. These allow for better spacing and sequencing of aircraft, including not letting certain flights take off until a there is certainty that landing slot with minimum holding time is available for them.
The plane in this story is a commercial propeller one, common in the 1950s. Current planes are jets and can fly above the harsh weather, and have much better instruments to navigate such disturbances, and also have more precise weather information. They are also much better in landing during adverse conditions.
Hank Searls wrote the script using the pseudonym “Michael Frost.” He wrote nine Suspense scripts, with seven of them as “Frost.”
As for the title, what is the “void” and why is it “crowded”? A “crowded void” is a situation that is sometimes described as “feeling alone in a crowd.” In this case, the sky is empty, it’s just air, but the weather, the other planes, and the pilot’s professional and personal responsibilities fill it even though the sky is so huge it can barely be filled. The pilot is crowded in, surrounded by passengers and crew, but his mind and motives make him is selfishly alone.
This program was recorded on Thursday, January 9, 1958. Rehearsal began at 2:00pm and ended at 5:00pm. Recording began at that time and concluded, with in-studio edits, at 7:00pm. Production edits continued from 7:00pm to 9:00pm.
There are two surviving recordings, and the Armed Forces Radio Service recording (AFRS#964) is the better recording.
The other recording is from an aircheck in poor sound quality from an Armed Forces Radio station broadcast. It is an unknown station in Atlantic Standard Time. There are multiple stations in that time zone, from the easternmost provinces of Canada down through the Caribbean Islands.
There is no surviving network recording. Advertising spots on the network program were Newport cigarettes, Grove Laboratories, Ex-Lax, and another ad determined closer to broadcast time.
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https://archive.org/details/TSP580119
THE CAST
Bartlett Robinson (Captain Sam Bradley), Ellen Morgan (Jeannie / Sally), Shirley Mitchell (Mrs. Gordon), Dee Tatum (Airport P.A. Announcer / 2nd P. A. Announcer), John Dehner (Mel), Barney Phillips (Doctor Lambert / Air Traffic Voice / Passenger), Sam Pierce (Dispatcher Voice / Approach Controller Voice), Bill James (Baby), George Walsh (Narrator)
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