Wednesday, July 7, 1999 | 9:37 a.m.
Every weekday at 5:50 a.m., Cyndi Harper nestles into the back of a narrow single-engine, fixed-wing Cessna airplane to report on the city's streets from 5,000 feet in the air.
"Being above it all really puts things into perspective," says Harper, director of operations for Metro Networks, an independent traffic reporting service that files reports for 22 radio and television stations in the valley.
"You see all these thousands of people going to work and all the little houses next to each other and you realize that everybody has their lives and their problems. It gives you a clue of how you are a part of this great big whole."
It's the softer side of the daily grind experienced by the handful of airborne traffic reporters in Las Vegas who battle hot winds to brief commuters and viewers on the valley's highways and byways, which are usually mauled by construction projects and peppered with rush-hour accidents.
Tasha Reiko, who works daily from 1,000 feet in the air for KLAS Channel 8 news, says it's always a relief to be above the hassle. But the job -- although not typical -- is still a job.
"It's fun, but it's a lot of work," says the Hawaii native as she stands next to the Ranger model helicopter, holding her long brown hair away from her face on a recent windy day. "Everyone says that it's got to be 'cool,' and it is, but it is not as glamorous and fun as they may like to think."
"Chopper Tom" Hawley, transportation reporter for KVBC Channel 3, says traffic news has evolved even since the 1980s from simple hourly updates to stories about construction, transportation and breaking news.
"The helicopter has a view of everything," he says, adding how the copter's roaming camera can zoom in on a location to relate immediate images to viewers. For an airborne reporter, breaking news is only minutes away.
"You can get across the valley in 10 minutes," and miss all those red lights below, Hawley says.
This makes air reporting "an ideal platform," Marc Martinez, traffic reporter for KTNV Channel 13, says.
"You are able to get over a scene and stay directly over a scene and get into places that you wouldn't otherwise have been able to."
They work from the air, but seem pretty grounded about the dangers, thrills and duties of an airborne traffic reporter.
'It's not for everybody'
Although Harper "curses the alarm (clock) ... even after all these years," by 6 a.m. the tall redhead is strapped into the 8-foot-long plane, with a "very large cup of coffee," amid big black boxes of transmitter equipment.
She dons a headset which connects her to the awakening world below -- and to the handful of radio and television stations that are lined up and waiting for each hour's scheduled traffic reports.
"It's intense," Harper says, adding that the Cessna is hot, bumpy and cramped with equipment and people.
"Before I hire someone to go airborne," she says, "I put them up in the aircraft to see what their puke potential is."
By 10 a.m. on a recent day, the plane, sans air-conditioning, was already a steamy 115 degrees.
The traffic-reporting veteran for 17 years (the last seven of which have been spent in Las Vegas) developed an iron stomach at her first flying job in Cleveland, Ohio -- where her pilot subjected her to mid-air dog-fights, 360-degree roll-overs and other air tricks -- and shrugs off the typically shaky rides on the desert's unpredictable winds.
"In Las Vegas you have a lot of thermals (pockets of hot air) that knock you around," she says. Heat rises from the black-topped city and pushes against the underbelly of the plane.
Harper, one of Metro Networks' three airborne reporters, jests and jives her way through 10,000 60-second spots a month for the stations with which she works.
The job is "not for everybody; you have to be able to ad-lib," she says, as disc jockeys test her hourly.
Radio station announcers, particularly at KOMP 92.3-FM, "like to play (jokes)," Harper says. "They make suggestive remarks or sounds ... while I'm on the air (broadcasting live) with another station."
Harper collects traffic information from a high-tech army of sources -- the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, the Nevada Department of Transportation, Clark County and City of Las Vegas Public Works, among others.
She also assesses a situation the old-fashioned way. "I just look out the left window and see if (Interstate 215) is backed up," she says
A stalled car backing up traffic makes Harper wax philosophical.
"From up there, I see that everything is a domino (effect) and we affect each other's lives," she says. "We are touching people we don't even know we touch."
A serious car crash two years ago brought her down to earth: A semitractor trailer truck slammed into the car she was driving on Interstate 15, and she found herself inches away from passing cars as she was loaded onto a stretcher.
She asked a witness to call her job to say she would be delayed -- and that traffic would be backed up because "the accident was blocking the middle lane!
"It gave me a whole different perspective on accidents," she says. In the past she reported on the inevitable fender benders with irritation for being a nuisance, whereas now she empathizes with the accident victim.
"It's really spiritual," she says. "The wonder of the world opens to you."
'It's always something'
To battle the summer sun penetrating the glass bubble-nose of the Channel 8 helicopter (temperatures can reach 120 degrees inside), Reiko starts off the day in a professional suit, but later changes into shorts and a tank top.
"You just won't survive up there in the heat and the wind with a (suit on)," she says.
With a touch of makeup and hairspray, Reiko transforms from a fresh-faced young twentysomething in denim shorts and a ponytail into a professional newswoman as the chopper climbs to 1,000 feet above the city.
"It's reporting from a whole new perspective," she says.
Reiko uses the same local traffic contacts in the city and county as Harper, but also relies on Channel 8 viewers who call in with questions about construction or particularly worrisome intersections.
The chopper is her second office, she says, and she wouldn't trade it for a desk job, although it is not as glamorous as some may think.
"You are up there alone, you have to do everything -- be photographer and reporter at the same time. You are balancing a lot of things at once."
That includes deciphering the voices chattering in her ear piece: the pilot asking "Where to?"; Channel 8's producer saying "stand by" before going on the air; master control monitoring the flight; and, finally, the newscast -- while she finishes applying lipstick, fiddling with her hair and positioning the bug-eyed Flir Ultra-Media II sky camera from a telephone book- sized black box on her lap.
"Sometimes you get it and sometimes you don't," she says.
On a recent day Reiko had a clear signal for a full 15 minutes while on standby, but when she began to speak for the live broadcast, only every other word was heard by viewers, as the broadcast signal unexpectedly broke up.
"It never goes as planned on the chopper," she says.
'The big picture'
Hawley says the helicopter offers a perspective of the world that can't be obtained by drivers.
"You see the big picture," he says. "There is a perceived difference and a real difference" of the world people navigate daily.
One tangled skein of confusion is the Spaghetti Bowl construction, on the U.S. Highway 95 and Interstate 15 interchanges, which Hawley has watched slowly come together from above over the past few years. He visualizes the relief the structure will bring to traffic in the near future.
"You can drive through it, but it's hard to conceptualize what it is going to look like," he says.
A picture can be worth ... well, more than a brief description.
Sometimes traffic reports are wrong. For instance, I-15 can be said by other traffic information sources to be running smoothly, but actually a six-car pile-up has cars backed up, seemingly to Los Angeles.
"Sometimes when you rely on a (police) scanner or telephone calls, you know some of the information is going to be wrong," he says. "I feel like the helicopter has a view of everything. You can verify it with the naked eye."
A traffic reporter for 13 years, Hawley doesn't get nervous when hovering over fires, murder scenes or other breaking news.
"I've always said if you have good pilots and good mechanics, then you have a safe operation," he says. "Well, safe as anything."
And he loves to fly. "If I didn't do it every day, I'd miss it."
'Magic carpet' ride
Martinez first rode in a helicopter when he applied for the position at Channel 13 in October 1996.
"It was a great sensation, almost like riding a magic carpet," he says. "You are hovering, going backwards, sideways."
Martinez agrees with other television traffic reporters that the height advantage works for most stories -- to show proposed nuclear waste routes or improvements for schools.
"Most people expect a little delay at major arterials, so they know what to look for," he says. "We wanted to get more breaking news ... show Metro (police) doing a crackdown at intersections, or new traffic lights going in," as well as report general interest stories.
Martinez has spent two hours every afternoon for the past three years in his mobile office, and prefers the high-flying beat to that of grounded general-assignment reporter.
"It's been really exciting to watch these things grow from the drawing board to reality in just three years," he says, adding that he was particularly impressed with the completion of the I-15 North on-ramp to U.S. 95 West.
"It was phenomenal," he says of the on-ramp's opening. "The minute that they opened it, the line of traffic that I had been looking down on all these years just disappeared, almost instantaneously."
The helicopter can bypass all of the red lights and traffic jams to get to the news faster than, well, suckers on the streets.
In covering news stories, Martinez says he has to be careful not to make any assumptions on what he sees from his vantage point.
"You don't want to speculate too much, you have to clarify. 'This is what it looks like,' " he says. "We are professional observers. If we were on the ground, getting (factual) information, it's as simple as finding the closest officer who can tell you, 'this is what happened.' "
He also is aware of his job's dangers, but says he has faith in the staff pilot, Ernie Tyska.
"I've had a light come on (in the cockpit) that said 'Engine failure,' and we had to make an emergency landing," he says. But that didn't stop him from going up. "I got right back in."
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