AIRWAYS HISTORY
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12 13 14 The Official Airline Guide ( OAG ) was the essential handbook of airline schedules used by customer service agents and travel agents . The Guide came in North American and World Wide editions , both of which consisted basically of reprinted timetables from each individual carrier with the World Wide Edition also including columnar tables of additional schedules from different parts of the world . In 1958 , a quick-reference version of the North American edition was introduced . the flights between point A and point B in order of departure time .
There were problems with Eastern ’ s first quick-reference timetables , not the least of which was a listing of aircraft type as simply “ 2-eng ” or “ 4-eng ”, indicating that Eastern ’ s management felt that the public was only interested in whether an aircraft had two engines or four engines , and not the specific type . They were wrong and , after a couple of years , Eastern went back to printing timetables in columnar format that gave full information . Select quick-reference listings were printed in the front of the timetable while the full system schedules were printed in columnar tables .
But the tide had turned and , within a decade , almost every airline had switched to printing their timetables in the more user-friendly , quickreference format . For anyone whose
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64 AIRWAYS MAGAZINE MARCH 2024 www . airwaysmag . com