zippinbye

Did you never cross the pond prior to iPads? Nothin' wrong with that, but the charts you mention from 20 years ago are no different from those that I carried until about one year ago (The Atlantic and Pacific Hi charts and the Delta-specific Orientation charts).

I as a Second Officer on the NW DC-10 at the time frame you refer to. It was "high tech" compared to just a few years before; I had the "fancy" Litton triple INS that didn't run out of waypoint storage part way into the journey. The predecessor (Universal INS), so I heard, could hold something like six or eight waypoints. If you failed to continuously update your route per book procedures, the autoflight system would drop into Track or Heading and just keep trucking on, wherever that might lead. Actually, it must have been Heading, because guys would preselect a heading to 30 degrees off track so that a big turn would get your attention if you ran out of INS legs. Every time the plane went into a bank, we'd snap our stare to the FMA to make sure it was a legit turn.

Before my time and for a bit after the 1986 Republic merger, NW did not have computerized flight planning. S/Os were thrown paperwork that included the plotting charts and basic nav info for canned routes, like course, TAS, winds aloft etc. That and an E6B whizwheel gave the third guy plenty to do, building a flight log with crossing times and fuel burn estimates. I believe the S/O would then run a fuel plan by the captain (who would say "add 3000 pounds for the wife and kids"), and then call in the fuel order.

Kids these days - you just don't know the fun of guessing the number of miles off the INS will be when you get your first DME/DME update from a ground station as you make landfall. It was not uncommon to have a different view of the coastline than expected.

100% agree that technology has made our occupation easier and safer, even in my short time (as it feels to me) flying. The big deal evolutions all occurred over about a 30 year period until the mid-sixties. One of my flight instructors went from shooting a sextant out of the roof on a Pan Am Boeing 314 Clipper to captain upgrade on a DC-3 with transitions to pressurized birds like the DC-6, then to turboprop and turbojet; Electra and 707. He retired as a 747 skipper. Talk about seeing some change ... in a career, he went from wave top cruise altitudes with a handful of pax at 140 knots in celestial navigation to hauling hundreds of humans at over 40,000 feet and Mach .85 with semi-accurate navigation systems, with nary a worry of crash from mechanical failure. Supersonic airliner flight became a thing during this period too. Since his retirement in the mid-70s, the evolution of our airliners has been more refinement than leaps ahead; fuel efficiency, noise reductions, ETOPs and precision navigation/approaches are neat and everything. But when I trek from the US to Asia in the A350, I'm still hauling a few hundred humans at around 85 percent the speed of sound in a piece of machinery that feels pretty "gee whiz" for its time, but I'm not experiencing much different than that guy did in his Whale in 1972.