THE ordinary air traveler may get a glimpse of a control tower while taking off or landing: an area of greenish glass behind which moving figures are dimly visible. He may see radar antennas turning or catch a moment of radio chatter from the cockpit. He is comfortably aware that someone and something guides his plane, but he usually does not realize how vast and complicated that guidance process really is. To describe it in detail, TIME'S editors decided to use not only text but also ten pages of color photographs and maps, showing how a single flight is nursed from coast to coast.

Obviously this required extensive camera work inside control towers and airplane cockpits during flight, which is not normally permitted by the Federal Aviation Agency. But FAA Administrator William F. McKee granted a sweeping O.K. with the remark: "It's about time that somebody did something to let the people know what's going on up there." With the full cooperation of TWA, Senior Editors Peter Bird Martin and Marshall Loeb began the task of showing what's going on up there.

Researcher Andrea Svedberg traveled from coast to coast inspecting control centers and their latest equipment. Picture Editors Charles Jackson and Arnold Drapkin assigned ten photographers (who used radio cars to stay in touch with control towers) to cover three flights from before the lift-off at Los Angeles to beyond the touchdown in New York. Of the three flights logged, we eventually selected number 740, which yielded the best pictures.

Trickiest shooting was in the eerie, semidark IFR rooms (for Instrument Flight Rules), where flights are tracked on a set of radarscopes. In all, 40 TIME people were involved, in addition to dozens of staff members of TWA, FAA and air-traffic control. Impressed with the skill and coolness of the personnel in towers and cockpits, one of our photographers remarked: "This assignment has given me greater peace of mind about flying."

What makes the whole enterprise of traffic control particularly important is the tremendous U.S. aviation boom, which is constantly putting more and bigger planes aloft. That end of the busy sky is surveyed this week in a second major TIME story. Our cover article concerns Airplane Builder James Smith McDonnell, whose billion-dollar corporation, which is about to merge with Douglas, is doing its share to crowd the airways--and to venture into space beyond.

AS TIME'S Essay section rounded out its second year, it was among the winners of the 19th annual George Polk Memorial Awards. The honors are granted by Long Island University in memory of the CBS correspondent who was assassinated in Salonica in 1948 while en route, so he thought, to an interview with the Communist rebel leader Markos Vafiades. TIME Essay won the award, said the citation, for its "factually tight, balanced and absorbing reports to help make meaningful the most baffling complexities of the day."

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