I do not know about you but I love old books. If nothing else, thinking about the many people and many hands that have owned and touched such an old volume feels like a travel back in time. But reading some of them and comparing the style and content to our contemporary reality is also an exercise worth undertaking.
It is a pity that so few professional books that were not sold in general bookstores remain. FAA forerunner CAA and other such organizations had many manuals and other interesting publications right from the start but it is rare indeed to find one these days that you can also obtain for your own collection.
It is for this reason that I was so happy when Virginia Volk kindly agreed to share with Roger-Wilco and the readers of our Bookshelf section a real and unique gem, the 1941 edition of the Federal Airways Manual of Operations. You can download the Manual here.
If you are familiar with the ICAO provisions applicable to-day and in particular ICAO DOC 4444, PANS-ATM you will no doubt find this Airways Manual of Operations familiar. This book dates from 1941 and the first edition of ICAO DOC 4444 (at the time called PANS-ATC) saw the light of day in 1946. One of the main inputs had been the material already used extensively in the USA and which you can now add to your treasured relics and ATC mementos.
Looking at the Manual in more detail you will get a good appreciation of how air traffic control worked back then. One paragraph (C1.030) describes how it was the responsibility of the aircraft operator to decide whether they sent a traffic clearance obtained from the airway control facility right away or only when the pilot reported over the point from which the clearance was applicable. The implications are clear: only the operator talked directly to the pilot and he was flying slow enough to have no problems getting his onward clearance only when he was actually over the clearance limit already! A slow and leisurely world it must have been!
Mind you, this was still 12 years before the famous mid-air collision over the Grand Canyon and the subsequent development of “positive control” by Stan Seltzer, Ed Barrow and Tom Hennessy. It would be nice to find a version of this manual which had been re-written in the spirit of “positive control”.
In the meantime… enjoy!