It’s all in the Bag

Many readers of Australian Flying will remember a GA pre-flight ritual, which sometimes took longer than the flight itself: attend the briefing office, collect NOTAMs and weather forecasts, fill out the flight plan form. Sometimes, the weather justified a discussion with the ever-helpful forecasters, who would caution when visual meteorological conditions might not prevail. Then pilots would take the flight planning form to one of the briefing officers, perhaps the most patient people the world has ever known.

Once reviewed, the flight plan form would get an official stamp that honoured everyone’s perseverance. Details of the flight were distributed by the briefing office’s teletype to relevant flight service and ATC units. In the 1960s and 70s, the process mostly worked, but by the 1980s, its complexity had fallen out of proportion with what pilots wanted and governments were prepared to pay for. Avfax, which succeeded the briefing offices, still survives, although for most people, fax machines have gone the way of the dodo bird. NAIPS followed, and its website interface still provides a basic, but painful, pre-flight briefing experience.

Computer-based flight planning took off in a big way during the 1990s. A home or office PC with one of the leading software packages combined, for the first time, information about a specific aircraft and its performance with air routes, navigation aids, airport information, and NOTAM and weather products in one straight-through process. When complete, the pilot uploaded a flight plan message, and took the printed output, together with paper maps, charts and instrument procedures, along on the flight.