In my day…

In 1965 there were 2,207 aircraft, including airliners, on the civil register. It is now around 13,000 (not counting the RA-Aus listing).

Older pilots will remember some of the ways GA flying was done then while newer pilots can only know how it is done now.

If you operated at a capital city airport a pilot had to physically go to the Flight Service office to check the weather and have the flightplan approved and stamped. This was real E6-B slide graphic computer times. NAIPS and the likes of electronic information dispensing did not exist. If you were upcountry you had to phone the Flight Service office. You called up the phone exchange and prefixed your call with ‘Air Move priority, reverse charge call. I require phone number XXXX. ’ You then copied down the weather given to you and lodged a flightplan.

When the flight commenced you had to be within two minutes of your ETA at a waypoint and call up Flight Service to advise your actual time of arrival – all very much shades of World War 2. Indeed the vast majority of the Department of Civil Aviation (DCA) and Flight Service officers were ex military and carried that training and requirements across into civil flying. These days Flight Service has effectively gone, save for a bit of HF use. The Flight Service offices are gone and everything is done electronically. And if you made a gaff then there was an incident report to be completed and submitted to the regulator. The incident report form was numbered as a CA225, commonly called a ‘225’. Pilots joked that they had joined 225 Squadron when they filled one out.

No doubt some DCA fellow got a car, an office, a secretary and a big salary to change that to some new number that meant nothing to anyone.

The most numerous early radio was the valve powered 10 channel AWA VC-10. We have since passed through transistor radios to solid state models. Transponders did not exist. Charts were supplied at no cost to pilots.

When you landed at a country airport there was always an aero club or charter operator. Someone would always be available to refuel your aircraft. The quantity was in Imperial gallons, not litres. Fuel was commonly 80/87 octane, red in colour. Payment was typically by carnet card. Carnet cards were around long before credit cards as we know them came into existence. Oil

Country aero clubs have by and large also gone, costed and regulated into extinction.

was also readily available. These days it is self-service and oil is hard to find unless you take it with you. Country aero clubs and small charter operators have by and large also gone, costed and regulated into extinction.

Pilot licences came in a small green folder. For each and every aircraft endorsement one had to send the endo form into DCA, have it formally recorded, the licence stamped and sent back. All this must have soaked up many administration man hours.

Airshows were a regular feature in the GA scene in those days. Indeed there was a country airshow every few weeks then. Not now. Regulations, costs, insurance, approvals of all sorts and manpower issues have all markedly reduced the number of airshows now being held. There seemed to be an inexhaustible supply of new students for flight training. The Baby Boomer bubble was rising. Instructors seemed to be running from one student booking to the next, such was the demand. One has to ask when they did the paperwork? Those were the days when the Senior Commercial licence was the highest level one could obtain outside of airline employment. To join an airline one had to be below age 28, have the magic 1,500 hours and the Senior Commercial. Over 28? ‘Sorry, next please’.

Sitting for the commercial subjects was totally unlike the on-demand exams of today. There were three or four sittings of the CPL subjects per year. These were held at city race course venues or town halls. Retired school masters supervised. The exams were hand marked and there was little time between the results being received and the closing of the next exam applications.

The commercial exam results had a sunset clause of several years on them so that a CPL student picking his way forward could well be in the situation of having passes expire behind him as he attempted to pick up the remaining subjects. Dick Smith getting into the CAA put a stop to all that and created the one CPL exam. That got modified after Dick left the CAA.

For older pilots the above will no doubt be reminders of yesteryear. New pilots can only wonder how the heck the system functioned before electronic systems came into being.

What will tomorrow bring?