1990s Email Journal

page updated 2020-02-26

1990s Flying/Email Journal

The decade of the 1990s was the most interesting of my life. I started it as a 747 first officer for Evergreen International, an all-freight airline, and became a captain after a year. Midway through the decade I went to work for Tower Air, a JFK-based all-747, primarily passenger carrier. Tower didn't hire into the left seat, so I had to start over as a first officer and again work up to captain.

All Tower pilots were domiciled at JFK, and flying for Tower kept me away from my Oregon home for 20 days every month. To assuage my loneliness and to keep my family—especially my wife, Jean—abreast of what was happening to me, I sent detailed emails.

You'll notice a lot of negativity. That's a natural consequence of the interesting part of airline flying being having to deal with problems, and the number of problems being exacerbated by flying for an under-capitalized carrier doing both scheduled and charter work to and in third world countries.

The message links below are from earliest to latest from top to bottom, left to right. The date form is yyyy‑mm‑dd followed by where I was when I wrote the message.

I've avoided changing the original text even though I now cringe at some of the things I said or the way I said them. Keep in mind that I wrote the messages two decades ago. What I said back then might not at all be the case now, either as to places or my attitudes. Also, see the bottom of this page for how different some things were then.

Text in this color and thus indented was not in the original messages but was added when I posted the messages or later to further explain or correct what I originally said. Again, bear in mind that this was two decades later. Also, you will occasionally see a BACKGROUND link that gives additional information relative to their placement in time. Indeed, the very first link is such and tells the situation I was in when the emails start in April 1995.

Links in this color are to messages that include material about operating the aircraft, and in those messages I've put a line of this color along the right side those parts of the message. The idea is that if your only interest is aircraft operations, you can easily skip to that text.

A few things to remember about the 1990s:

Cell phones were not yet ubiquitous. I remember thinking in 1999 that if I wasn't retiring soon, I might think about getting one. When I retired, I knew of only one captain who had a cell phone.
No Skype back then. I could have saved a lot of money had it been available. I typically spent between $200 and $400 a month calling Jean, my wife, even with all the emails I wrote.
The Internet was still in its infancy insofar as general usage was concerned. Compuserve had its own network, as did IBM, and I had email accounts with both. Eventually they connected their networks to the Internet. Access to those networks was through dial-up, and some countries didn't have in-country numbers; you had to place an international call—always expensive from a hotel.
There was no WiFi. Many hotels, and most of those in third-world countries, had hard-wired phones in the rooms. No RJ-11 plugs. I carried a few small tools to butcher the hard-wired systems and connect, but I wasn't always successful.
Laptops didn't have USB ports. The first laptop—if you could call it that—that I took on the road didn't even have a battery. It was a Mitsubishi portable computer that had to be plugged in to an electrical socket for power. It had a monochrome screen and no touchpad or mouse. I think it had a PCMCIA port, but I'm not sure.
DOS at the beginning of the 1990s was the preferred operating system, and when I wrote the DOS weight & balance software that was eventually used by three airlines, I deliberately didn't include the ability to use a mouse because, at the time, most of the computers it would be running on didn't have a mouse.
The 747s I flew were the -100 and -200 aircraft, the so-called classics. three-man cockpits, no glass cockpits, and oceanic navigation was by triple Delco Carousel INS (inertial navigation system) that actually had spinning gyros. Crossing the North Atlantic, they were allowed to drift up to 10 nautical miles left or right of course before it was considered excessive. We had to manually transfer the latitude and longitude of each waypoint from the flight plan into the INS. They could only hold 10 waypoints at a time. The non-flying pilot had the task of keeping the INS waypoints updated as the flight progressed.
Newer aircraft had SATCOM, but we didn't have any newer aircraft. All of our oceanic communication was by HF.
Our flight plans came to us on a single sheet of paper long enough to list all waypoints. The long sheet was possible because they were transmitted over ARINC to teletypes with their continuous roll of paper. The captain, f.o. and f.e. each got a copy. On a typical flight plan from JFK to Tel Aviv, you got the equivalent of about three 8½ by 11 inch sheets. I would fold the flight plan to fit on a standard clipboard I carried. This was typical for the pilots. The f.e. usually folded his and put it on the narrow counter at the front of his panel. On the JFK-TLV plans, there were all the usual check points through to the destination plus a plan from a redispatch point on to the destination in case a redispatch was required.