Normally, I’d string everything together in one post with fancy formatting and stuff but it’s been a rough week at work, I’m exhausted, and I’ll be lucky to do this without so many typos the replies become illegible. So get ready for a lot of little posts. 
How do you know when it’s your turn to merge onto the freeway?
The flow of air traffic around an airport is called a “traffic pattern” because it does follow a pattern. Without getting too elaborate, there is a “standard pattern” that you can default to most of the time without getting into trouble, as well as frequently updated reference guides (available in several thousand places across the US as well as the internet) that give you more detail and tell you where and what the exceptions are.
You approach the airport in a safe manner - one that will not interfere with traffic flow. You observe the traffic. You enter the pattern in a manner very similar to merging onto a freeway. Everyone (is supposed to) keep watch to avoid everyone
else.
Another driving analogy here: Some roads are really busy and have elaborate traffic lights directing drivers. Some even still have live human traffic cops maintaining order. But other streets, out in rural areas, do just fine with stop signs. And some not even that.
All of this is dependent on traffic loads. An airport like O’Hare requires a very intensive level of traffic control because you have very big, very fast jets using multiple runways, each runway having and arrival or departure (at peak, in prime conditions) every 90 seconds. That’s really fast and heavy traffic.
There are airports in rural areas that might go days between take offs and landings.
It would be foolish to maintain air traffic controllers at the latter - a waste of their time and talents, not to mention expensive.
So, again, without getting too technical, you have different levels of air traffic controls. You have the huge hubs, smaller towered airports, then airports without towers. Morris and Cushing are non-towered and traffic control is handled by the pilots themselves. (The no-radio/radio failure procedures for towered fields have already been covered in prior posts.) This is done through a combination of right-of-way rules - for example, traffic in the air has right-of-way over all ground traffic, whoever is on final has right-of-way over others in the air, and if someone yells “MAYDAY!!!” they get to go to the front of the line - negotiation, and (one hopes) common sense and courtesy. In that, we have the advantage over car drivers in that, assuming everyone has a radio, we are actually able to talk to each other.
So, I might say “Morris traffic, Citabria 8503 3 miles west of the field at 2000 feet inbound for landing on 36” to let folks know I’m coming. If there’s more than one Citabria I might add “orange and white” to “Citabria” to help distinguish myself from others. Once in the pattern, I might say “8503 on downwind, 3rd for landing, traffic in sight, Cessna on base and Piper on final.” But now someone says “Mooney on downwind, I thought I was 3rd for landing.” OK, everyone looks around and figures out who is really 3rd and who is 4th. If I’m in the Citabria and I’m actually really 3rd, and there’s a Mooney behind me, then I have right of way over the Mooney… but I might (and I have, once) yield to the Mooney because he’s significantly faster than I am and either I’ll have to speed up or he’ll have to slow down a lot – neither alternative being comfortable to those of us involved. And remember - airplanes can only slow down so much before they stop flying entirely. There are sitautions where the minimum speed of someone else in the traffic pattern may exceed the maximum speed of what I’m flying. If someone pipes up and declares themself a student pilot on a solo flight nice folks might give them more room or yield to them. Learning to evaluate and manage these situations is part of learning to fly.
Some pilots are not comfortable with the above. They stick to airports with towers and air traffic control. Some pilots aren’t comfortable with towers - they stick to pilot-controlled fields. Me, I try to stay comfortable with both, thought I lean towards non-towered fields because of the sort of flying I do.
Anyhow, radios are not required at non-towered fields (details, exceptions, and regs omitted from this explanation under the assumption most would find such excruiciatingly boring - there are exceptions, but don’t worry about them). At some non-towered fields, such as the one near my home in Indiana, virtually everyone carries a radio anyway. Even so, you can’t assume - if someone was flying into Gary Regional (a towered airport) and had a radio failure my home field is one of the first places they’d considered diverting to land, if they chose to go that route. And some people do drop in without radio from time to time.
Cushing has a unicom/traffic frequency, but it’s almost never used. I’ll announce flying in, because there might be someone listening, but if it’s obvious no one is there or no one there has a radio I’ll stop bothering to use mine. Cushing has a lot of ultralights, which typically don’t have radios, and hang gliders. Although you could probably carry a handheld on a hangglider, and there are no rules against it, I’m not aware of anyone who actually does that. You could carry a radio on a parachute, too, but the only skydiver I ever met who did so was blind - he needed the radio so someone could yell “FLARE!” in his ear when when he got close to the ground. (That, by the way, is a 100% true story. Hinckley, Illinois, 1996). The point, I guess, is that not only is a radio optional at Cushing, even if you had one it would be largely useless because no one is listening anyway.
Morris gets a lot of traffic from Cushing, being located conveniently close and having food and flush toilets available. Some days the traffic is running 50% no radios, between the ultralights and things like the Stearman. Then you’ll hear things like “Does that blue highwing have a radio or not?” or “There is a flight of trikes, probably no radio, northwest of Morris” or “Comanche on downwind, there’s a biplane behind you and he doesn’t have a radio”
This sounds more chaotic than it really is. It really isn’t that different than pulling onto a busy freeway, and folks do that all the time without needing a car-to-car radio.
If you are flying without a radio it is even more important than ever to watch for other people, since you won’t be able to hear the traffic around you. You also have to be ready to get the heck out of the way of other people who might assume that if they can’t hear you, you aren’t there. But that’s also true if you have a radio, because there are a few idiots flying up there.
