Paper Plates Were No Picnic

I found myself staring at my bookshelf this morning. This is not unusual. I stare at a lot of things as I sip my first coffee and try to kick-start my mind.

There are four leather Jeppesen binders on that shelf. Two were for approach plates, one contained my airline’s FOM (Flight Operations Manual), and the last held my Boeing 777 Flight Crew Training Manual. All are old and have lain unused for years, yet I can’t seem to get rid of them.

My original Jepp manual binder goes way back to my first days as a pro pilot. I have no idea how I could have afforded that thing, let alone paid the extra fee to have my name embossed on the cover, but I did. 

I can remember the day the mailman delivered it at Trans-Air, the flight school I worked at in Tallahassee. It had the luxurious smell of new leather—not rich Corinthian leather like Ricardo Montalbán was hyping for Chrysler that same year, but a nice clean odor just the same.

Containing the “SE5” coverage of most of the southeastern states, this bulging binder accompanied me on hundreds of instrument instruction flights, all-night cargo runs, and a plethora of Part 135 charters. Keeping up with the revisions was a joy at first because doing them proved to the world that I had arrived as a pro-pilot. 

My original Jepp binder was semi-retired during my first few years as an airline guy. Flight engineers did not carry approach plates. We carried everything else, like aircraft manuals and paysheets in our heavy flight bags. I kept up my SE5 coverage for use with my general aviation instrument students, but I did not use it much. Seventy-five hours of flight engineering a month left little room for yanking and banking in small aircraft.

During my early airline years in the late seventies and early eighties, flight crews were more pack mule than pilot. Your average DC-9 copilot schlepped a flight bag containing two Jepp binders, the aircraft’s FOM, and a ton of other items from candy bars to soft porn magazines to a pack of smokes and a lighter.

We hefted our Samsonite suitcases in one hand and our heavy flight bags in our other. Nobody thought of putting wheels on luggage yet, and the little rolling carts that some flight attendants were beginning to use were not for us macho guys. I am pretty sure my arms lengthened at least two inches from carrying that load from gate to gate.

Paper approach plates, lovingly encased in leather binders with your name on them, are now officially obsolete. Jepp is publishing its last paper plate in October of this year, and pilots will fly into the future, gazing at their iPads and using other devices like brain implants as they slip the surly bonds of gravity. 

Except for a little old man nostalgia, I have no heartburn about this move. Things change. For example, once we pilots discovered wheels and put them on our suitcases, we never looked back and had a lot fewer backaches. 

I have been using my iPad as an approach plate reader for years. It is a godsend for a pilot whose vision is getting a little “mature,” because I can enlarge the printing on the plate with just a finger movement. The fact that there is a little airplane flying on the plate overlay is a great added bonus.

Paper plates were not really that great of a thing. You had to keep them current, and if you used Jepps, that meant hours and hours of sitting, removing one page at a time and replacing it with another. 

Revisions were a chore I usually did while in flight. No need to waste precious time on the ground doing this job. Some pilots hired a crew scheduler to do their revisions, but I was too cheap and embarrassed at the messy state of my flight bag to ever allow another person to plumb its depths. 

My approach plates, through my neglect, would get out of date and order over time, and I always ended up paying the 40 bucks to buy entirely new contents at least once a year around recurrent training time, when having a current plate during your checkride was a very good thing.

The pieces of paper describing various IFR procedures would suffer wear and tear not seen on today’s electronic flight bag tablets. The plates you used the most—like the ILS 27L in Atlanta—were usually coffee-stained and very hard to read. Others, like the VOR approach to Lexington, Kentucky, were never used and were relegated to the trash during a revision, after never being seen or used by a pilot.

In addition to approach plates, we carried a set of leatherette pouches containing all the low IFR charts for the country. These were almost never used. We looked at, wrote on, and spilled coffee on our high charts. These charts (not maps) were also frequently discarded and replaced by dead trees.

Low charts did have one often-used function. They made great sunshades. Just put a little masking tape on it and stick it to the inside of your windshield or side-view window, and the glare won’t bother you at all. Just try to tape your iPad to your windshield and see how that works out.

Life goes on, and even though my leather binders take up shelf space that could be better used by newer books, I will never get rid of them. I suppose my family will chuck them after I am dead along with my three old airline flight bags that I can’t bring myself to give up.

Someday pilots of today will have shelves filled with old iPads, I guess, and will tell tales of the antics of their robotic copilots and captains. They will laugh about using wheels on their bags before anti-gravity luggage was invented, and they will wax nostalgic about the days when we did not control the weather and had to fly through rain and clouds.

The seven-ring binder is no more. So, it goes …