The arrival of Lufthansa’s shiny new Boeing 727 in Budapest was an event in itself. The flight from Frankfurt was almost always on time, the 727 looking like it had come from Boeing’s delivery centre the day before… We learnt early that she could climb and descend like no other jet serving Budapest and as… Continue reading A short left turn
Category: Flashback
Pilot and controller stories from yesteryear
At the cradle of SWIM
SWIM, well the name that is, was born in the early morning on a misty February day in a hotel room in Luxemburg. It was 1998.The abbreviation of System Wide Information Management, SWIM has now become an integral element of both SESAR and NextGen, the air traffic management development projects in Europe and the USA,… Continue reading At the cradle of SWIM
My AWACS-story
When we, then young air traffic controllers got to the Hungarian ACC to begin our on- the-job training in mid 1975, it was a very strictly restricted area yet shared the building with the Country’s air defence command positions. Armed forces of the Peoples Republic’s Army had guarded the entrance since the secrecy of a… Continue reading My AWACS-story
C-17s on peace mission
For those of us who worked at Ferihegy Airport in the 60s and 70s, military service was a simplified affair. Just one month of ground-pounder training (as opposed to the two years meted out on the less fortunate) where after we went back to our civilian jobs of, in our case, controlling aircraft. The assumption was that if NATO came invading Lake Balaton and the Great Hungarian Plain, we would be doing the same job, albeit in uniform…