Crock’s Thoughts

Ah, the good old days… before the internet made everything “convenient,” we in aviation were out there doing things the analog way. The “I-hope-this-paper-isn’t-still-warm-from-the-fax-machine” way.

Do I remember life before the internet? Heck, yeah! I survived it—and not only that, I helped airplanes get off the ground during it!

Back then, when I started in aviation, weather charts didn’t arrive with a click or a tap. Nope! They came screaming out of a dot-matrix printer that sounded like it was being attacked by a swarm of angry crickets. You’d lean over the machine with a cup of coffee in one hand and hope the chart didn’t smudge or wrap itself around the spindle like a cinnamon roll from meteorological purgatory.

Need to contact a pilot? Today it’s email, text, or some flight tracking app that knows when they blink. But in the pre-internet era? You picked up the actual phone. And not just any phone—the nasty beige one chained to the wall at the airport with buttons that stuck and a receiver that smelled like 30 years of stale coffee breath and old jet fuel.

Flight plans? Oh, we sent those alright, but via fax. That glorious machine that made a screeching noise like a dial-up modem being tortured by bagpipes. You’d stand there feeding the paper in like it was a sacrificial offering to the aviation gods. And if the fax jammed halfway through, you just sent it again and hoped the second half showed up before takeoff. It was like playing a game of “Guess That Clearance.”

The flight schedule wasn’t tucked away in some digital tablet or live-updated app. No, we had a wall-sized magnet board, and it was a masterpiece of organized chaos. Pilots, aircraft, trip legs—all color-coded magnets shuffled around by dispatchers with the grace of caffeinated chess players. If a flight changed, you didn’t push a button. You climbed a ladder, yanked a magnet off, stuck it somewhere else, and hoped nobody knocked the whole thing down like a low-tech game of Jenga.

Back then, your backup system wasn’t “the cloud.” It was Dave in operations, who remembered everything because he drank twelve cups of coffee and never left the building.

We didn’t need internet. We had clipboards, grit, and a sense of timing so finely tuned we could hear an inbound aircraft three states away.

So, the next time your Wi-Fi goes out and your weather app won’t load, remember—some of us launched flights with a fax machine, a rotary phone, and a prayer. And we liked it that way!

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go reset my Wi-Fi. It’s interfering with my nostalgia.