Originally Posted by
kcockayne
I got my air band radio in 1964. AFR were using flight numbers then - also the mass majority of European airlines eg DLH,AZA,SWR,KLM ; & PAA & TWA. The US non schedule carriers used regs at that time. Not surprising as most of their flights were one offs & not scheduled. This meant that they filed individual FPLs for each flight - so there was no reason why they could not use the a/c reg. It wasn’t so much computerized FPLs then, more the use of Repetetive FPLs using paper cards to store the info. These cards had holes stamped into them to denote which day of the week the flights operated. All you had to do was insert a prong into the “ Monday hole” & all of the Monday flights were selected. Ingenious, really !
Thanks for the info. RPL's as I remember them from the 70's/80's were stored on a computer system somewhere, presumably LATCC, which then regurgitated them into the system some 4 hours before STD. Interesting to hear about the card system.
I asked about Air France in particular after a learned colleague of mine was convinced they were using registrations in the late 60's which I didn't remember, so thanks again for confirming otherwise.
Rather mundane, but I remember 3 airlines who somewhat boringly used their 2 letter flight number prefix for their ATC callsign, hence Invicta/IM were "India Mike", IAS Cargo/FF were "Foxtrot Foxtrot", and Trans Mediterranean/TL were "Tango Lima". No doubt there were numerous others which my brain cells might wake up and recall eventually.