Points for Pilots

  Aviation Weather Center (AWC) Prog Chart Forty years ago, filing a flight plan was complicated. You wrote the relevant information on a special form, called the flight service, and explained that you wanted to file a flight plan. In a tedious back and forth, you transmitted the data in the sequence provided by the form, often interrupted by clarification of names and other possibly misunderstood information. Activation was done after takeoff. You called the flight service using a particular frequency. This often was done under pressure since you wanted to use the radio for something else, like listening to other traffic in the area. This gradually improved, and you could file the flight plan using a computer. But if you took off immediately afterward and tried to activate the flight plan, the Flight Service didn’t have access to the flight plan yet and hence couldn’t activate it.  The remedy to that problem was a tedious filing process done via radio, with lots of corrections and bac