Airborne_Again wrote:
You would get more recent NOTAMs by phone from a briefing office
When I got my PPL in 1992, going to the briefing office was a compulsory part of the navigation trip(s). Thinking about it now, what a superb service it was. A meteorologist explaining the weather to you, filing flight plans over the desk. And yes, there certainly were NOTAMs 
Today we have much better weather forecast, and everything is online and available, but is it better?
Back in 1994 I also used to get both Notams and weather from the Met briefing office ar LFBN (Niort) or print it on a till roll from Minitel. The Met office was superb but has sadly, like many others, been closed and Minitel, many of considered was state of the art. But this was back in the days before broadband, and was really slow compared to what we have now.
The key thing however was that very little was notamed and if you didn’t check them (I was never taught to use them in my PPL in 2000/2001; the FI would take a look at a wad of them pinned on the wall, for the local area) it didn’t generally matter. Even in 2003 when I busted a French nuclear power station P area, those areas were not showing in enroute notam briefings on the original UK ais.org.uk site, presumably because they were not distributed to foreign countries
The thing which comes through these “adventurer” accounts is that aviation was a lot less anally retarded than it is today, and that fitted perfectly with the scene where info was much harder to publish, and to find. In the days of Churchill Jr’s exploits above, you could fly with a “can do” attitude and got away with it (well, unless the wx got you, and you died). Today you can arrive on some miniscule place like Alderney and cause a bit of a “jobsworth panic explosion” because you didn’t bring a yellow jacket. Today’s “easy compliance information publishing” scene feeds all the anally retarded character types which naturally seek jobs in professions where such character attributes are valued (again, valued by management which itself rose through the anally retarded ranks of other anally retarded people). So the system feeds itself.
It’s like airspace infringements. The CAA could hardly run this policy if it wasn’t so easy to track traffic and find people. Someone like Churchill could have busted every airspace along the way and few would have cared.
Same with the UK GAR form. Until about 10 years ago almost nobody bothered about it. Then suddenly somebody woke up and decided to enforce it. Same with French “customs” airports; Brits like Churchill were routinely flying between the UK and any “strip” in France.
If I look at electronics (my hobby, and profession) magazines from Churchill’s flying era, they were very good and nice to read. Both retail and trade mags. Today they are packed, cover to cover, with, guess what? Compliance related articles, planted as “advertorials” by vermin firms which make a living on the back of the regs.
Airborne_Again wrote:
There was never any problems getting NOTAMs.
Same here. I started in 1983 in Switzerland, we always had them sent by post in a VFR bulletin which came together with the AIP subscription.
Weather, we had briefing stations at all airfields, Meteor at the time, later TAMSI, today skybriefing.
LeSving wrote:
When I got my PPL in 1992, going to the briefing office was a compulsory part of the navigation trip(s). Thinking about it now, what a superb service it was. A meteorologist explaining the weather to you, filing flight plans over the desk. And yes, there certainly were NOTAMs Today we have much better weather forecast, and everything is online and available, but is it better?
Indeed yes! I remember one weather briefing at an airport in Germany where the meteorologist gave me a handwritten GRAMET-like vertical section of my route with all cloud layers etc. Those were the days!
Peter wrote:
I was never taught to use them in my PPL in 2000/2001
That actually says more about your flight school than anything else.
Or which countries have a tax-compliant (or really wealthy) population which supports a heavy taxpayer subsidy to certain areas
2004, LSPV, a tiny aeroclub at a tiny airfield, a Skyguide man drives up in a van to, wait for it, refill the paper in the laser printer. Even back then it was obvious this was not going to be sustained for much longer.
UK schools were pretty much the same as each other. Also the vast majority of GA never flies very far, so a local notam briefing, perhaps casually checked at the start of a day by an FI / aeroclub president, was sufficient. Today is very different; GA simply cannot exist without the internet due to the massive volume of garbage being published.
I read about Churchill in the US AOPA magazine some years ago. I believe he stopped flying well before he died. In fact I am surprised he died in 2010 because I read the article a lot more recently than that. But… time flies, and a search found it in no time here from 2009. Prostate cancer got him… what a bugger!
Peter wrote:
In the days of Churchill Jr’s exploits above, you could fly with a “can do” attitude and got away with it
Well, flying a Seneca even in those days IFR meant getting the necessary ratings and the IR, which at the time was quite a feat. I did my initial IR in the 1990ties, much more complex than today with home learning e.t.c.
But yes it was more a can do attitude as today, even if some airports even then did not want GA. Airspace was less complex but more restricted (before airspace E a lot of that was what today would be D or C) and information such as NOTAMS had to be more bundled for publication, so short term shots were more difficult to communicate.
Maybe that we had LESS information, particularly in weather, got us to be what today would be considered careless given the flood of model information we have, but was then simply best effort with what we had. If I just reflect what has changed in the 18 years I work at the met office in terms of information available, it is totally staggering. In my experience, quite often we can get dissuaded from flights we would have simply tried in the old days and diverted somewhere if we could not get through by the flood of information we have now, each slightly different or even opposing at times and rarely reflecting the actual conditions to a degree that planning would be better than it was.
The major loss I see is the direct contact with experienced professionals who KNOW what is important for pilots and who know their area and it’s particularities. It still can be done but it is quite expensive and cumbersome to call up several met offices on a longer flight. In doubtful scenarios however, not much can replace the experience of skilled briefers if for nothing else than to put the information we do have into perspective.
For the IR, the UK had a “700hr route” mentioned e.g. here. Most “old” UK IR holders that I ever met over the years had followed that route.
Yes I agree that the amazing looking wx graphics we get today probably scare us off doing many perfectly doable flights.
Peter wrote:
The thing which comes through these “adventurer” accounts is that aviation was a lot less anally retarded than it is today, and that fitted perfectly with the scene where info was much harder to publish, and to find.
Like many things today, the increase in nonsense here is driven (created) by the ability to measure activity and produce documentation, with tax bill sometimes attached, versus the value added by doing so. Witness the non-existent ‘increase’ in corporate management efficiency produced by computerization.
It’s a disease that may end up being western society’s next downfall. And as always, aviation leads the way.
