Oh, look.....the audio panels are in the right place, too! At least you can still enjoy the same sliding window you had back then.

VOR / DME/ ADF and an altimeter that looked like it came out of an old C-172. Ground speed? Calculate it yourself or ask ATC. ACARS that displayed 8 or 9 characters. They didn’t call it the 737-200 Basic for nothing.

Second trip off IOE flying from DEN to OAK. BIGGG C Captain asks me if I've done a Flap 15 Improved departure yet. NOPE. He winks at the Engineer and up come the numbers. It was hot as hell.

Pretty sure that the mains cleared the localizer antenna by no more than 100 feet at the wrong end of a 10,000 foot runway. Vertical speed was abysmal but man, we were hauling ass. At least, that's how I remember it. I probably have most of it wrong except the last part.

On IOE...the Captain used to ask ATC for Direct to XYX when it was 500 miles away.
ATC - "Uh, sure....proceed direct".
Him...."OK, thanks. Got a heading for us? It's not coming in yet"

Departing ORD on 32L from T10. At V1, there was barely enough runway left to yell "Oh Shi_!".

LGA to 4. Turning off prior to 31 or whatever that runway is. Or the Expressway Visual to 31 and turning off before 4/22.

I could go on, but I won't.

Good times.

Perfect attendance used to be something to strive for. I am not a fan of people who come to work sick but bragging that you have less than 40 hours of sick bank is not a badge of honor brother. Rethink your work ethic.

Sorry, but the foul-smelling yellow fluid running down my face from on high has caused me to lose sight of my work ethic.
Being lied to and stolen from and then sued has caused me to lose concern for my work ethic.
Cameras in ops.

Ethics? Since when around here?

dude.....you going to retire with 1.25 years of pay in your sick bank that you don’t get paid out? Do we have PTO? No we don’t sooooooo.....

James,
Fast forward 25 years. We now do those same departures every day, but usually at reduced power. We have "normalized" using all of the available runway, in the name of saving gas and maintenance costs.

Take off in a Guppy NG at severely reduced power on a 12k foot runway, lumber into the air 10k feet down, cross the threshold lights at 50 ft, then you get a big increase in power to throttle up to climb power.

727 descending in to MIA at night.(Remember our hub there?) Idle descent at barber pole, descending through mid 20s barber pole disappears and indicated airspeed goes past the last tick on the indicator. (zoom in on pic to see what that is). True airspeed indicator: 608. Man, was it loud!

I've enjoyed reading your comments about and looking at your pictures of the 727. I flew the plane for Brand X for 20 years, I used to say 17 of them climbing (my son works at TK so I lurk here sometimes). I retired 15 years ago flying the 777 but the 72 owns my heart. I loved the mission plane performed so well. My favorite flying was up in Montana doing DME arc approaches into Helena and visual approaches into Butte. She's a grand old lady now but certainly was never mistaken for a FLUF.

We used to play a lot of tricks on the FAs. My favorite was to pull the CB for the flush motor in the fwd lav. Then we would trip the flush handle and wait. When the time was right we'd push the breaker back in and the motor would flush. They either freaked out screaming or they would ding us and want a write up. Most screamed.

I flew the 727 for my first "real" aviation job. Our dispatch would consistently plan long range cruise as we were always near the range limit given our routes. The salty old ex-rEAL/PAA/BNF CA's would tell us youngins to ignore the plan and just fly fast for the whole profile. We always landed early and up on gas.