Anniversary – First US flight school, established by the Wright brothers, opens
On 03/01/2010, in Anniversaries, by steve
100 year anniversary on 15 February 2010
Seven years after their historic first flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903, Wilbur Wright was scouting locations suitable for a flight school. The idea was to train a number of pilots who could in turn teach flying to the wealthy individuals who were expected to buy the airplanes manufactured by the Wrights. Perhaps it is important to note how the commercial aspect of aviation was already rising to the surface just a few years after the success of the Wright Flier…
Orville Wright and his students at Montgomery, Alabama, 1910
Wilbur was looking for a place with mild temperatures, not too strong winds and a flat surface. He visited several cities in the South, including Augusta, Ga. and Jacksonville, Fla. before coming to Montgomery, Alabama in February 1910. Frank Kohn owned a cotton farm just northwest of the town and this turned out to answer all of Wilbur’s requirements. The location for the flight school had been found.
The State of Alabama went out its way to offer incentives to the Wrights to settle there. They were offered land, lumber for buildings including a hangar, cars and trucks, hotel accommodation and even water.
Anniversary – Boeing 747 first revenue flight
On 09/12/2009, in Anniversaries, by steve
40 year anniversary on 22 January 2010
N736PA
Pan American World Airways is long gone but the 747, into its fifth generation, still strives. Forty years ago on 22 January 1970 it was a Pan Am clipper that introduced this undisputed king of large aircraft to revenue service. N736PA, a 747-100 flew from New York to London and became famous on account of the originally scheduled 747 having had to turn back from the runway due to engine trouble. This rather ominous start of revenue services was quickly forgotten, helped in no small degree by the now legendary reliability of all 747 variants.
Anniversary – The fall of the Berlin Wall
On 01/11/2009, in Anniversaries, by steve
20 year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 2009
Roger-Wilco deals with politics only in as much as it is aero-politics so you may wonder why we would include in our list of anniversaries the fall of the Berlin Wall now 20 years ago on 9 November 1989. As you will see, this momentous event had affected the course of history, the lives of millions and air traffic management itself in ways more than qualifying it for inclusion. But first a little history.
The first cracks
The fall of the Wall actually started some 690 kilometers (383 NM) away on the Western border of Hungary. By early summer in 1989 more than ten
When the iron curtain opened...
thousand East-German tourists were camping in Budapest and near the Austro-Hungarian border, planning never to return to Erich Honecker’s Germany. It was a sign of the times that a few months earlier the Hungarians and the Austrians held and open-border day (the iron curtain was still more or less in place otherwise) and a number of East-Germans, miraculously aware of what was happening, used this chance to walk over to Austria. In spite of forceful protests from East Germany, in August the Hungarians opened their border and allowed the East-Germans to leave if they wanted to. More then 13000 left in the first mass-exodus of East Germans since the erection of the Wall in 1961.
Anniversary – SATCO ATC system handed over in Amsterdam
On 25/10/2009, in Anniversaries, by steve
50 year anniversary of SATCO handover 15 July 2010
SATCO control unit
If you look it up in an aviation dictionary, you will likely find that SATCO stands for Senior Air Traffic Controller. But the original meaning is much more exotic! SATCO was the abbreviation of Signaal Automatic Air Traffic Control, an automated ATC system FIFTY years ago!
SATCO was built by Hollandse Signaalapparaten in Hengelo, The Netherlands based on the ideas of Mr. A. T. Martinsen, a wartime military air traffic control officer. Development of the system took four years and implementation was planned to take place in three phases.
20 October – ATCO day
On 19/10/2009, in Anniversaries, by steve
Air traffic control centers are often far away from the airports and the sunscreen glass of the control towers (which for the time being at least tend to be on the airport…) prevents people from getting a glimpse of those inside. To pilots and vehicle drivers on the airport surface, the voices may be familiar, some may even feel like friends, but it is rare indeed to have a face to go with the familiar voice.
The lay press goes so far as to recognize only one place those voices may come from, the tower, as if approach control or area control did not even exist. Many a good movie makes the hair rise on our backs when they make the same silly mistake.
Air traffic controllers… who are they? A bit of a mystery for those who know that they exist at all and for the rest…blank.
Of course in the big, global aviation family they are well known and rate a place at the head of the table.
Anniversary – IL-18 HA-MOH crash at Budapest-Ferihegy airport
On 10/10/2009, in Anniversaries, by steve
35 year anniversary on 15 January 2010
Some anniversaries are occasions for sadness and a moment’s silence. An aircraft crash is always sad, a huge loss for everyone involved. When HA-MOH flew into the ground in the early evening of 15 January 1975 only 9 crew members were on board and they all lost their lives. She was on a positioning flight coming home from Berlin. They were stuck there for several days, waiting for the visibility to improve in Budapest.
The plane struck the ground 1360 meters from the runways threshold and about 120 meters from the centerline. The probable cause has been given as bad weather, darkness, fog, lack of crew coordination and possibly spatial disorientation.
Anniversary – First radar system deployed at Budapest-Ferihegy airport
On 06/10/2009, in Anniversaries, by steve
50 year anniversary on 6 May 2009
Those who visit Budapest Ferihegy airport these days see a very different facility from what it had been in 1959. If arriving on one of the low fare carriers, you do pass through the original terminal (Terminal 1) but it has changed quite a bit even though an effort was made to preserve the original at least on the inside.
But 1959 was a significant year mainly for air traffic control. On 6 May a radar system was commissioned, the first ever in Hungary used for civilian traffic.
Anniversary – First European STC for CPDLC on VDL Mode 2
On 03/10/2009, in Anniversaries, by steve
5 year anniversary on 12 April 2010
The issuance of a Supplementary Type Certificate (STC) is not normally an event that we commemorate years later… except of course if the STC is the first instance in Europe of Controller Pilot Digital Link Communications (CPDLC) using VDL Mode 2 being approved on an aircraft type.
I this case, EASA accorded the STC to the Airbus A300F4-608ST and the date was 12 April 2005.
EUROCONTROL’s Petal trials followed by LINK2000+ were groundbreaking activities that proved the technical and operational feasibility of CPDLC on VDL Mode 2 while also creating the basis for interoperability between the US and European digital link services.
The Airbus STC was an important milestone recognizing the maturity of the system. In subsequent years many other aircraft types received similar certification, all important milestones in their own right but the first one stands out as a beacon of success certainly worth remembering with pride.
Anniversary – The Y2K roll-over
On 02/10/2009, in Anniversaries, by steve
10 year anniversary on 31 December 2009
On call to usher in a new millennium
I am no longer with IATA but when I joined originally, night shifts were not mentioned as part of the job. Not that I would have minded, as an ex-air traffic controller I had plenty of experience watching the sun rise over the airport perimeter fence, or looking at the radar screen with the morning traffic building slowly…
But somehow 1999 brought two events that landed me once again in night shifts. One was 8.33, the famous new channel spacing in Europe and the other, the even more famous, Y2K computer bug.
As it happened, I was not closely involved in the preparations for the year-end rollover, this task having fallen in our office to other colleagues who had their hands more than full for the 18 months or so preceding the end of December . As our readers will probably know, the Y2K problem was the result of some “clever” programming tricks used by early programmers to save storage space, representing the year in dates by only two characters. Possibly they never expected computers to be still around by the year 2000… In the end, not only did some legacy hardware, as well as a lot of legacy software, survive to see the new millennium, even some of the latest creations came with the Y2K problem still built in and ticking away…If you enter a date in the year 2000 into one of those machines, the year will show 00, resulting in the computer possibly crashing in a number of colorful ways.
Anniversary – IFPS first flight plan treated in live operations
On 28/09/2009, in Anniversaries, by steve
15 year anniversary on 27 April 2010.
It was a rather cool and misty April night in 1995 when I found myself driving to EUROCONTROL at an hour normally reserved for rest and retrospection. The time was just past 9 p.m. when the duty supervisor of the Integrated Initial Flight Plan Processing System (IFPS) let me in… security was very different back then.
We walked to the operations room in silence but very much aware that something big was about to happen. Members of the C-watch were looking at their computer screens, technicians were making final checks but in general this was all more for passing the time until midnight GMT than anything essential. The system was ready to go. As a member of the IFPS Project Tem, I knew it was ready…
