John D. Silva had a brainstorm in 1958. He was working for Los Angeles TV station KTLA at the time and scheming of a way to beat the competition. Silva, an MIT and Stanford-trained engineer, envisioned putting a TV camera in a helicopter. The goals, common ones in journalism, were to get to the story first and effectively, immediately relate the visual story to viewers.
Silva's successful creation, which has since become de rigueur on TV news broadcasts, is discussed in his obit in yesterday's LA Times.
The KTLA helicopter was eventually sold to a competing LA television station in 1974. The chopper's original pilot, Larry Scheer, was included in the deal. He didn't stick around. Scheer's replacement was none other than Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot shot down over the former Soviet Union during the Kennedy Administration. Ironically, Powers died in a 1977 crash, when the news helicopter he was piloting "ran out of fuel returning from a Santa Barbara brush fire," according to the
LA Times obit.
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