Originally Posted by
Turbosina
I dunno...there are some great articles from old aviation magazines from the 60s and 70s where they talk about airline schedules, and it made me feel tired just reading about it. It was either Len Morgan or Gordo Baxter from Flying magazine -- they were both columnists and Len Morgan retired as a Braniff 74 CA –– anyhow, one of them wrote of a typical schedule on the 727 at Braniff or TWA or somewhere. I want to say it was 7 legs and it reported at midnight, and they did this 4 or 5 nights a week.
I don't have the article handy but it was an eye-opener. We have it WAY easier than those guys did back in the early days of the jet age.
Plus, a monkey can watch the AP follow the FMS route that we simply download from CPDLC. Now imagine old-school jet route/ airway navigation using steam gauges and dual VORs and DMEs. So much more work.
Did some of this on the DC-9. It wasn't that big a deal. The biggest crisis is when the highlighter you used on your chart ran out. In some ways, it was easier. Fly a heading, proceed direct, no drama programming the box.
That said, some of the old Republic/North Central routes had 11-14 legs. Very squishy rest and duty rules. Who remembers "reduced rest" and "legal to start, legal to finish"?
No weather radar in the early days. Lots of procedural IFR (non-radar), which must have been a real hoot in places like MDW or LGA. Transponders weren't even a thing until the 60's, and even then most radar sites didn't have SSR. Lots of GA traffic with NO transponders, and there wasn't really any airspace classification anyway. At all. Altitude reporting wasn't even that common in GA until the early 90's, about the same time TCAS first really started to pop up.
Smoking.
Unairconditioned hotels.
Lard
Len Morgan is one of my favorites, and had some great stories, but broiling in a DC-3 during a Texas summer would make most people these days wilt in the first 3 minutes. No water sippy bottles back then, either. You drank coffee. Even when it was scorching hot.
Yes, schedules were built by hand, so there was some inefficiencies in that, but contracts weren't all that dialed in, either. Lots and lots of unpaid time sitting around. 24 hour reserve, tied to you phone, and that sucker was the landline wired to your house until the beeper became a thing.