Detailed Discussion Desired: Flying in the Past
 

Hi all,

As a connoisseur of all things retro, especially in aviation, I've been thinking a lot about what flying used to be like, from a technical perspective of those sitting in the front offices. Little information seems available on this, as most people are (obviously) more concerned with passenger comfort these days than pilot comfort.

So, my question is, what's different today about being an airline pilot than it was in say, the early 90's, or even before then?

How widespread was ACARS usage, and what was it capable of back then?

What did a typical airline pilot's day look like in 1990 as compared to today?

Feel free to get as detailed and technical as you desire, I love detail!

Thanks!
Chris

sh!t - hearing the 90's referred to as if in the distant past.... I must be veritably ancient!!

Quite a lot of info here;

http://www.pprune.org/aviation-histo...ops-1960s.html

Well for a start, flying a charter jet around Europe in the '80's, you had to navigate the bloody thing from one VOR to the next!

And, if you did not see the 'lights' by 200ft, it was off to the diversion. Non of this sit on your hands and wait for the cat 3b autopilots to put you on a runway, so you could go home.

Quite a few aircraft had CAT 111b in the 80s The 11-1 I flew for BCAL had it and other types as well.

Dan's didn't mate! Nor their 727s

As staircase says; When I joined the VC10 fleet in 1969 we had to navigate using VOR's and NB's and the 'heading select' knob. We used Aerad charts to find the tracks. I remember that there was a line across the track indicating where one should tune the next VOR (the position depended on the relative strength of the VORs). Is this line still there, or has GPS made it redundant?
When there were no ground aids we would have to navigate using the stars and loran. Most of the time we thought that we knew where we were.

Well, you obviously always found home, that's all that counts. :ok:

Isn't that what being a pilot is all about? Better than sitting up front trying to do The Sun's cryptic crossword!!!

Well I could go back to flying Hastings and Varsity for the queen, and having a navigator to even do that. (Navigate that is, the flight engineer did the crossword, although it always seemed to be the Times or Telegraph)

Then I thought I was giving up getting wet sitting on a flight deck when I left and joined the 'civies', but there I was again, on a shed flight deck wearing a raincoat to keep dry in rain storms.

Would I have missed any of it? Not a lot, but some of it - you betcha!

Anyone remember "Airmanship"?

In the mid-70s after some years of VOR tracking, I transferred to the B707 fleet which was just being retrofitted with early INS, (Litton7 ?) or Omega. These early INSs were prone to a not insignificant drift rate so, as Airclues alludes to, we were often not exactly sure where we were after a long oceanic sector. Today's crew NEVER are unsure of their exact position such is the improvement in nav equipment. This does breed a different mindset though..........................
For the "magenta line" generation a "map shift" seems to be totally ignored. Why not just accept that the ND never lies?

I remember a particularily sarcastic comment from an instructor to one of my fellow students after a memorable screwup on a solo X-country...."Airmanship is Not the boat you arrived on!" followed by a rather brisk impromtu ground school for all on "Navigation at low level and some of the potential pitfalls which may be encountered with an emphasis on map reading". Fun daze.

chris341,

Your question covers quite a lot of territory. Hard to know where to start or what to cite because change has been so vast and rapid.

I had the span from DC3 to glass cockpit (but not WB international). I'll assume my experience is not appreciably different in a broad sense from my fellows in other parts of the world; it may be and I just don't know it. Please excuse if that's the case.

From the standpoint of the change around strapping in for a day in the cockpit, there are three things that come to mind:

(1) The relationship with fellow employees has changed for the worse, particularly the cabin crew. Now there's a bullet-proof door between cockpit and your allies aft of the door…and opening it in flight almost involves an act on Congress. I'll ignore the matter of VERY large airlines vs smaller for those relationship differences post flight…they exist but perhaps for reasons of scale.

(2) Technology has "progressed" to the point where much of the mental work, and awareness of the total in-flight environment with all that encompasses, has been taken over by devices; these devices seem to promote less hand flying leading to a degradation of this basic skill. The advantage in such "progress" is much debated and I don't have the energy to enter that debate here.

I will say that it used to be that a pilot would have to assemble several, if not many, bits and pieces of information from now rather rudimentary sources (VOR and its radials, DME, IAS, altitude…and a paper chart) to produce a 3-dimensional picture of where the airplane was which would dictate what you should do about/with that in terms of what needed doing. I use the term "Mind's Eye" to say where these calculations took place and resided.

I also say the Mind's Eye has been blinded by "progress". There is now a generation of aviators who not only have no Mind's Eye but are not aware of the need for it as a baseline function. I knew that on the rare occasion I was dispatched without an FMS, I was likely to be flying solo as my partner was a bit too accustomed to FMS, DGFS and AP.

(3) The demands of getting from Pt. A to Pt. B remain the same at a base level.

This isn't a criticism of them; it's not THEIR fault. They can only function within the system as they found it.

There are likely other differences I don't recall.

One big difference was if the passenger didn't make the flight, he would be stuck without his bags.

All this changed after PA103.

Anil

Rules and regulations have changed. Back in the late seventies it was "there's the aeroplane, take it to XXXX and back, don't scare the passengers and don't scratch the paint". Nowadays, with the digital recorders almost to the point of noting how many times you pass wind during the ILS, most of my colleagues still working say it's a matter of trying to work through the library to remember which rule applies when, at the risk of no tea and biscuits.

Early 70s:

No SIDs
No STARS
Sometimes therefore long and complicated departure clearances to be written down and read back.
Two figure transponder codes
Not much traffic
Opposite direction traffic on same airway appeared miles away
Airway Fan Markers
Preston FIR (and volmet) in U.K.
Position reporting
Happy Days
mcdhu

Well here in the colonies we even had a "lighted airway" which was ahold over from the late twenties and forward. One of the last once that I can recall was from east of the San Bernadino mountains between Dagget and Las Vegas. I think this was shutdown back in the late sixties?

Short Haul European Ops 1990's

You operated the aeroplane with a checklist, knowledge of the systems and manufacturers stipulations and Airmanship. There were no SOP's (Esso-whats??). You just knew what to do and how. Every Captain did things in a slightly or not so slightly different way and some could be rather intolerant of a FO who did not fit right into their sometimes very idiosyncratic way of doing things. This could make longer trips unpleasant. One or two captains were out and out mavericks. They were scary. But you knew when to slow down, deploy flaps, what speed to set and when, etc etc there was no book to tell you other than the speeds and feeds from the manual. You flew a visual circuit or a visual approach as you did in a Cessna - just bigger. You had an IR so you knew how to do SIDS and STARS, ILS and NDB approaches. What else did you need to know?
FOs always had many hundreds of hours as instructors at least. Next to no-one did Approved 200hr courses (no one could afford them). This could be both an advantage and disadvantage as variation in quality and initial experience were both very much greater. At least you could talk aviation with them.
A Stable Approach was one without too many wobbles.
Briefing for STN - LTN goes, "Rwy 23 TOGA thrust, raw data right turn to BKY 3000ft 250Kts, intercept ILS26. Autopilot off. Autothrottle's for pussies. No questions (no pause) good! Standard emergencies. Your sector, Bloggs!" Apparently this is one way to bring on promising FOs! I leave it to your imagination what else it is good for.
Far from being a dirty word or heretical thought Airmanship was a highly desirable quality and far from being a complete debar from Captaincy it was considered an essential qualification! Jeez! What went wrong there?
Problems down route were solved by the crew on the spot with or without the assistance of a handling agent. The company was too mean to provide mobile phones so a call involved a half hour away from the a/c and a trip in a van to the handling agent's office.
Interviews were often of the "can you start monday" variety.
Type rating was always paid for by the airline. This is much the same as saying saying "the airline paid for the fuel" would be nowadays. Well, who the heck else would pay for a type rating? The question itself would have been so daft it would never have occurred to anyone to ask it.
Some type ratings were bonded but BALPA were of the opinion that a bond was an Illegal Indenture and was legally unsustainable but they never had the balls to test it. Thanks, BALPA.
Anyone could sit in the jumpseat at any stage of the flight at Captain's discretion. Girls. Journalists. Moslems. Family. Girls. Anyone, as long as they were more or less sober. And no harm ever came of it. "Hey thkipper" the No1 lisps on the intercom, "Therth a couple of hotties in row four, do you want to do a vithit"? Bless him, you think. They turn out to be men!
Smoking was a most unpleasant habit in a colleague if you didn't. Even so it never occurred to most to ask someone not to.
8 hrs from bottle to throttle. Some airlines had a serious drinking culture. (2 TRI's and me in hotac for the sim. They'd got to the pub the previous day at 1100 and had sunk 10 pints by mid afternoon when I left. They returned from the pub at 1900 and went to the hotel bar. Sim at 0400)
One particular Company Chief Training Instructor who in the sim screamed, yelled and belittled you and apparently thought this was useful training value.
Room parties that went on way into the 8 hrs too.
Landing drinks - a G and T slipped in to sip as you taxiied in (though some skippers insisted not imbibed until brakes were on)
The contents of the bar tipped into a carrier bag and consumed in the crew-room.
Resultant outrageous drunken goings-on in the crewroom.
Pillaging the hotel bar til it was empty after they'd shut it early due to rowdy crew.
An all-night bar near a N European airport where it was not unusual to have to step over unconscious FOs in National Airline uniform collapsed under the tables amongst the fag ends and spilt beer on the floor at 0400. If you could even see them through the impenetrable tobacco smoke.
Finding cheap or attractive items (furniture etc) in foreign cities and carrying them home in the hold. Once very disappointed that a Penny-Farthing bicycle couldn't fit through the hold door.
Curious promotion system for cc who got particularly "friendly" with the chief training captain.
Hotel crew bus was a huge Chevvy V8 van with a rorty exhaust, tinted glass and and swivelling velvet armchairs inside - riding to work in style wid yo bitches like some Harlem pimp!
Radioing the engineers at XXXX for an uplift of Green Oil. (slabs of pilsener) which you carried trough the terminal with your bags on the way back to the office. In uniform, of course. Why ever not?
Chief Pilots/training Captains straight out of the military who knew absolutely stuff-all about civvy ops. Some made utter goats of themselves.
Ex fast jet Captains who still operated single pilot and thought civvies were all gash. Oh boy did they get surprised - and some deeply humbled when bailed out by said gash low hours civvy FO.
Truckies, tanker trash and helo jocks who just fitted straight in. And, to be fair, the odd FJ jock too.
The last of the Atlantic Barons in their twilight years. Giants to a man.
5 day deployments downroute involving 4 sectors deadheading, 3 operating and two days on standby.
Nothing unusual about 4 consecutive days SBY downroute with a deadheading sector at each end.
Deadhead out to XXXX via YYYY, spend a day there (REST) and deadhead back home on day 3, then 2 days OFF.
Do 24 sectors in 4 days 2 days later.
No one ever flew more than 300 hrs per year. Ops couldn't organise it.
Pax numbers in the tens and twenties were normal.
Flights cancelled when pax numbers got too low.
You never stopped polishing your cv.
Every Thursday you rushed to WH Smiths and opened Flight magazine at Situations Vacant, smart ones had a subscription and got it Weds by post.
You did not dare get a mortgage for a decade or more.
Contracts where you flew 2 one hour sectors mon - fri and were finished by 1000.
Schedules where you spent 4-5 agonising hrs on the aircraft through the night on a split duty before returning at dawn. No facilities, no food, no heating, no crewroom. No legal split duty either, but that was considered an unnecessary whinge.
The gradual realisation that crew duty limitations were becoming collective targets as opposed to individual limitations.
In your first 10 years on the job you've been made redundant twice, had 3 companies go bust and been sold to someone else twice.
The relief in being made redundant from a rampant cowboy operator and going back on the dole. I hope you never have to work for a company that bad.
Companies where the CEO wrote every newly made Captain a thoughtful, individual handwritten letter of congratulation. Doubt you'll ever work for a company that good, sadly. They no longer exist.
Flying airways with 2 VOR, 1 DME and 1 ADF. En route charts always to hand. ""cleared direct XXXXX" when XXXXX was a waypoint on an airway 100 miles away defined by a VOR 200 miles away and the alps in between. You learned to either decline or use the RDMI as a sort of makeshift whizz-wheel and cuff it. No one seemed to mind and you were seldom far out on arrival.
The skill of setting up VOR and ILS frequencies in the right order so you had what you needed in sequence. How many children of the magenta line have ever flown a SID/STAR with manually tuned nav and courses to set?
Some FOs bought GPS sets and expected to use them in flight! Now that was scary.
No FO would dare to read a newspaper, let alone a novel in flight without asking the skipper first.
Captains you wouldn't even dare ask if you could read the paper but from whom you learned more than all the other captains put together.
ie the last of the Atlantic Barons in their twilight years. Giants to a man. But it wouldn't do to remind them that they'd finally joined the F.E.W. That would never have been a good plan but the mere thought often made me chuckle. How are the mighty fallen!
Learning the job from Captains rather than from books, company published doctrine or Esso Pees.
FOs keen to lean and pick your brains at every opportunity - nowadays there'll be a sullen offence if you try to suggest a different way; after all, they're fully , completely and utterly trained so what the hell is your input? This is where it's really come unravelled.
FOs who thought they knew more than you because they could spout the books verbatim did not exist and would not have been tolerated even if they did.
Few pilots of any rank could spout the books verbatim, it wasn't considered necessary or desirable. It was sufficient to know limitations, essential facts and where someting might be looked up in time of need. It was much more important to have the Airmanship to operate an airliner. It made for a more relaxed and less in yer face willy-waving competitive environment.
140KMH diagonally across the apron at an international airfield in the hotel minibus was normal. Airside driving permit? Que?
Previous two days were SBY but not used so they are reallocated as OFF to allow working days 7 and 8.
"Verbal exemptions" allegedly from the *AA to do things you knew Ops knew were illegal - extending duty, extending discretion, reduced crew etc were day to day occurrences. Even on Sundays when even the dimmest (Ops excepted) knew the *AA was closed...
On refusing such an illegal tasking the call transferred to Flt Ops Director who revealed that "We don't apply that paragraph in our Ops Manual" and backed it up with a fax!!! The skipper, I doubt not, has that fax framed on her toilet wall to this day.
Aircraft with multiple no go faults that flew like that for months.
Not being allowed to write defects in the tech log.
A week after 720 channel VHF became mandatory cringing in shame at the very public bollocking you're getting from London because you can't tune in Brecon.
A week later listening to Aepoblot getting the same treatment with added threats, and then having to fess up yourself for a second helping.
Boss whining he couldn't afford new radios. No wonder, the **** wouldn't afford routine maintenance either.
Operating multiple jets for months all over Europe with an Ops Manual unapproved by the *AA, and the *AA quite happy about it.
An aircraft variant on the fleet that was neither listed on the AOC not even approved by the (different) *AA
Snidey public remarks from Chief Pilot if you'd diverted from minima. Pussy...
Chief Pilot universally known as the pr!ck, Ch training Capt as the @rsehole. Guess what they called the boss's wife? Mind you, I suppose she really was the boss. Picture the quality of that operation...grim.
Ops calling you in the hotel downroute to ask what you thought you were doing for the rest of the week because they'd lost the plot. (a regular occurance!)
Being tasked to a destination outside the AOC coverage area, questioning it and being replaced by someone less in/quisitive/telligent. Marked as a troublemaker from then on.
Suites for captains in some hotels. (provided by the hotel incidentally as it would be undignified to give the Capt the same class of room as his crew) Made for great room parties.
Car parking outside the office, not a 40 min trek to the other side of the airport.
Crew morale and cohesion was rock solid and life downnroute was a blast.
Not being able to call Ops for every little decision, but this was when Airmanship not only still existed but was believed essential. You could easily go for a 5 day trip around Europe and not speak to Ops once.
Captains' decisions (almost) always respected.
Handling agent forgot to tell you the baggage handlers didn't show so you unknowingly take the outgoing bags back home with a wildly incorrect loadsheet.
Electric domestic fan heaters used to warm the cabin up pre boarding.
Type ratings taught by an engineer with the aid of a blackboard and some slides. You certainly got the inside knowledge that way. Later this degenerated to special briefings and a shonky CD that made your computer crash. It was not of much use to those of us who did not own a computer. They hadn't thought of that.
A Leatherman tool and a set of cutlery lived in your flight bag.
You used your whizz-wheel in flight.
A colleague who brought his daughter's hamster along for the day in his flightbag. Something to do with hamster-sitter u/s. It sat on the glareshield and watched the scenery. And crapped on VHF2 during the turnaround.
Security was someone who made sure no one got into the offices to steal handbags.
Terrorists were from that unmentionable bogland west of Wales.
Garb on the apron was a black gaberdine coat. No one ever got run over.
You altered the cost index as you saw fit according to the schedule.
You habitually landed with about twice the amount of fuel in tanks that you do now and thus seldom sweated about fuel for diverting even with Cat 1 only.
Airfields that returned their ILSs to the lessor in the summer because they "weren't needed". (even Luton did this!)
Interview questions like "How many cans of Boddington's fit into a standard flight bag"? The only interview question in fact, apart from "May I see your logbook" and "can you start monday". (Not mine, that one).
A Personnel dept, not some woolly euphemism like human remains.
Full dropline loadsheets for every sector.
A Metman you could actually talk to.
You knew the staff in FCL2 by name and vv.
Ops handed you an envelope containing all the paperwork needed on reporting. There were no printers or computers to log into and fill with data post flight.
Getting back late to an empty crew-room and finding Ops had gone home hours ago. Throw envelope into "in" tray and go home too.
Pilots briefed the cc, not vice-versa.
The utter joy in being able to run your own operation efficiently even if it was a single aircraft.
Remember, no mobile phones, no SMS, no internet, no ACARS, no computer on the crewroom. Just a VHF and the handling agent's phone in extremis.
Booking the curry house over Biscay via Portishead Radio, bless them.
Medicals once per year.
AME who told the same old tale of Lancaster ops for half an hour and then ran a line of ticks down the form and signed it.
Being in the middle of Biscay with no navaids working except for the ADF wandering about in the general direction of Bordeaux was not uncomfortable.
The expression "magenta line" was unknown although you'd heard some aircraft had TV screens!
Finding smoked salmon, "caviare" and brown shrimps in your business class crew meal.
Stinking the cabin out with garlic from your home-made curry heating in the oven when all pax got was a curly ham sandwich.
Alarming the FO by doing a PAR when you went to a field with military controllers.
Silly games like "Can I land from FL100 without touching the trust levers again?
Hand flying a whole sector!
Cleared direct LUT from sabadell! OK, midnight but even so!
No one had yet "rationalised" that if it isn't mandatory it must therefore be forbidden. See "Airmanship"...See visual approaches.
BALPA promising big and never ever delivering a thing. That one at least has stood the test of time.
Things have changed a bit since then, have they not? And thank goodness in many cases! More variety back then and far more interesting I think, but much progress made since then too.

mcdhu and noflynomore. Yep, that's how I remember it. Great times, great fun and wouldn't have missed it for the world. I wouldn't want to go back into flying as it is now, even if I could.