Radio: Visibility Zero

Marine Captain George Roy Hill, on a routine training flight, was flying through a pea-soup fog toward Atlanta’s Candler Airport. With the field socked in and his instruments out of order, he had to make his landing with the help of GCA (Ground Controlled Approach), the radar landing system. By voice radio, the operator on the field furnished Pilot Hill with simple verbal instructions, and Hill brought his plane in for a perfect landing—even though the field was so fogbound that a jeep sent out to lead him to a hangar was unable to find him.

Last week the Kraft TV Theater (Wed. 9 p.m., NBC) put on a play called My Brother’s Keeper which had for its dramatic finale an identical GCA landing of a Marine night fighter in Korea. This was not a coincidence, for the play had been written by Captain Hill, who was an actor (Walk East on Beacon) in civilian life. Hill also got leave from his Marine base at Edenton. N.C., to play the part of a newspaper correspondent (the only non-Marine role in the 20-man cast) in his own real-life drama, which happened last fall.

The star of the show was Actor Rod Steiger, who gave a tense and ably controlled performance as the GCA operator nursing the lost plane down its electronic path to safety. Steiger got so much realism into his acting that a viewer in Chicago phoned in to find out if he were actually a Marine radar operator. The answer: no. Steiger is a 27-year-old professional actor. During World War II, he got as far from aircraft as possible: he was torpedoman in a submarine.