AIRWAYS HISTORY
departed , when it was scheduled to arrive at its final destination , and where and when it stopped at cities enroute . The classes of service offered , aircraft type employed , and meals served aboard each individual flight were usually included .
The drawback of the columnar timetable was that , on a big system with hundreds of daily flights , finding every flight that operated between two points — say , New York and New Orleans — could be time-consuming . You might find a three-stop flight departing out of Newark at 07:55 but , had you looked a few columns over on the other side of the page , you would have seen that there was a nonstop departing out of LaGuardia at 09:10 , which would get you to your destination a good hour and a half before the Newark departure .
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In 1961 , Eastern Air Lines took the initiative to break away from the standard columnar timetable . In conjunction with Dittler Bros . Printing Co . of Atlanta , Georgia , which was the timetable publishing house used by many airlines , Eastern introduced the industry ’ s first systemwide quick-reference timetable . Now , all you had to do was look under your departure city , listed in alphabetical order , and find your destination city , also listed alphabetically , underneath the departure city heading . There you would have , in one place , a concise listing of all of
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62 AIRWAYS MAGAZINE MARCH 2024 www . airwaysmag . com