Aircraft position information is essential for safe operations, including the parts that happen on the ground. While this ground piece has not been ignored, it is true that until recently it was not afforded attention equal to the flying piece. Consequently, increasingly congested facilities experienced a rapid rise in aircraft and vehicles getting lost on airports or going where they shouldn't go. The rate of runway incursions began to rise, and the rate of increase in the US was well beyond alarming (ATW, 9/03, p. 38).

George Cooper, head of airline operations and Aircom services for SITA, has a six-word business strategy: Voice and data, long-haul and short-haul, Airbus and Boeing. "It's an approach that takes into account what people say they want," he says. "What do you as an airline manager want to provide?"

The scarcity of new developments announced at this year's Farnborough air show stood in stark contrast to the overall feeling of relief that pervaded the attitude of show exhibitors, relief that the cycle finally has turned the corner and business is in the first stages of recovery. Forecasts started to trend upward and building rates are following slowly.

What a difference two years make. When ATW last reviewed the market potential for passenger-to-freighter conversion programs (9/02, p. 48), airfreight was just beginning to claw back from its most severe contraction since the early 1970s. The winding down of high-priority Y2K-related technology shipments, followed by the bursting of the dot.com and telecom bubbles and then 9/11, resulted in world airfreight traffic (FTKs) falling 6.6% in 2001, according to Arlington, Va.-based MergeGlobal.

In 1964, the US airlines were looking forward to a record year, especially for travel to Europe. With 88.52 million passenger enplanements, up from 77.4 million the previous year, they were not disappointed. They might have been, though, had their vision stretched to the end of the century: Their numbers were a drop in the bucket compared with the 666.15 million enplanements of 2000.

The transformation of commuter/regional airlines over the last 40 years has been nothing short of dramatic. Deregulation, cabin-class airliners, codesharing and top-shelf management have helped change commuter carriers from marginal players with shaky finances into billion-dollar Regionals that have become part of the industry's core.

It was a January luncheon in New York City, a rather small, intimate affair, that gave birth to the Air Transport World Industry Awards program. During that luncheon, ATW founder, publisher and editor Joe Murphy handed out 10 awards to airline executives from around the world. The Airline of the Year for 1974 was United Airlines.

When the Beatles arrived in New York in February 1964, they stepped off Pan Am's 707-320 Clipper Defiance, a first-generation pure-jet aircraft that was less than five years old. The classic 707-the longer-range, turbofan-powered 707-320B-was then quite new. A week before the Fab Four's US debut, Hawker Siddeley handed over a brand-new Comet 4 to Kuwait Airways. A brand-new Comet, by gad.