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Great Memories: South Florida's Legendary Sky 10 (WPLG)

In this morning's Boston Globe, a local newser who remembers the good old days, Andrew Dubrovsky, a WHDH vet, recalls the days when news choppers ruled the skies: "It was a zoo up there. Everybody would be in each other's way."

Sadly, cutbacks and a few horrific accidents have all but grounded the air fleets that once alerted lost ground crews to the location of a breaking news story: uh, looks like it's probably directly underneath those six hovering choppers, I'm guessing.

As the Globe reports, in Boston, WBZ and WFXT have shared a chopper for a year now, and WCVB and WHDH are talking about a similar agreement. The costs of keeping a chopper and crew on standby for breaking news has--with notable exceptions--led to some bad decision-making in newsrooms, desperate to keep the bird in the budget. What? A schoolbus disabled on the interstate? Holy crap get the chopper up and get Bob on the flashcam.

And yet, as I've lamented here before, I miss those days.

I love the above pic of Sky 10, one of the choppers I have a lot of memories flying, catching tapes dropped from the bird as it hovered over the roof of the station in Miami--and perhaps most important of all--when the chopper made a relief run into the Florida Keys after a hurricane, delivering suddenly delicious Publix supermarket sandwiches to a starving and tired crew.  Have you got a fave chopper?  A vote for the baddest, toughest, most take-no-prisoners news bird to ever fly?  I'm collecting votes--and, if you've got 'em--pics over on the LocalNewser Facebook page.