Homework—First Week

I remember it as being a list of 330, which is more than what I have below. I've tried very hard to chronicle what must have been on it, but that was >40 years ago. Many—the ones within our facility (ZJX)—are obvious and easy. The common ones outside our facility that we used routinely (the fixes on routes to high density destinations, for instance) are, too, but at some point, the line between what I knew in Jacksonville and what I knew in Chicago becomes blurred (there were several dozen identifiers frequently used that were common to both). In either case, I learned many more after I got down on the floor.

In any event, it's a bit of a tall order learning these in a week as well as starting to put together the map of the area (airways—both high and low, for example), and there were airplane types to learn, too—several dozen. In our day (you know, two feet of snow—uphill—both ways…) we drew the map on a clean sheet of paper. In later years, the sheets were provided with a dot for each of the NAVAIDs on it. That's less difficult by a factor of ten.

For the purists out there, these were active and accurate identifiers in 1968. Since then, some facilities (military bases, for example) have closed, and some NAVAIDs have either changed names or identifiers, or both. Also, some locations I named as VORs may have in fact been VORTACs. Many times an airport with the same name/identifier was not colocated with it, resulting in an eventual name change (examples—JAX VOR, located at CRG is now CRG—DAB VOR, located at OMN is now OMN).

(mouse over identifer to decode)

Last updated: 02 December 2009