On the Airbands

During a recent visit to the US I met my old friend Ed Flynn, who himself had just returned from the UK.

“Bob… these Englishmen, they really take this monitoring hobby of ours very seriously. You know, all they want is selcal codes. And they’re monitoring ACARS to get them from particular flights. The only reason they want the codes is to log another tail number! One guy I met has a huge bound book. He’s been logging tail numbers of airliners in it since 1957! The difference between us two and them is we’re interested in the text of the messages, these guys aren’t.” What Ed says is true. An English expatriate now living in Sydney named Gerry Abrahams was a few years ago madly chasing any material I had with a selcal code written on it. “I’m interested in selcal codes, Bob,” was Gerry’s permanent request, whenever he spoke to me.

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