History of Airways in UK – Green 1

I’ve been deperately trying to find the notes of a talk on the history of ATC in the UK I gave some years ago to a group of distinguished visitors to what was then The London Area Control Centre at Swanwick but with no luck. I remember talking about the implementation of the Metropolitan Control Zone and the first airway (Green 1) which ran westwards from Woodley but I can’t for the life of me remember the date – I think it was 1947.

However, I do know a man who will know. He’s been researching a book on the history of UK ATC for many years and has published several fascinating extracts in ATC magazines such as Transmit and the old CAA house journal in the late 90s

He hangs out at the “ATC Issues” section on PPRuNe as ‘xpz67’ – PM me here if you want to know his real name. I suggest you PM him on PPRuNe and he’ll be able to answer your questions in all the detail you could want.
Pete

Many thanks for all the info and pointers – I will give PPRuNe a look.

Yes , it was all so easy then.

back in the 60s when I first aquired an airband radio I lived under Red1 about 10 miles S of Ibsley(IBY) where there was a junction with Delta Blue 32(IBY-Compton I think) and Upper Red 8( >LND).To the south R1 went to ORTAC(still in use today)

Nightimes we used to get C-124s coming from Santa Maria ,eventually to ORTAC>IBY>CPT dir BPK to leave for Mildenhall. You could hear them coming 30 or 40 miles out.

Yes, It’s a great archive but very difficult to find things. The page you’ve flagged up is from about 10 years after the introduction of airways to the UK and deals with the re-alignment of Red 1 (later to be renamed Red 1 North) and the introduction of Blue ‘X’ which became Blue 29.

All this began to change again from the 1980s with the ever increasing use of computers for en-route navigation. First with the removal of the colours from the airway names and the use of just the first letter of the colour so Green 1 became G1 (spoken Golf 1) Blue 29 became B29 (spoken Bravo 2-9) Amber 25 became A25 and so on.

Then intersections had to renamed with just 5 letters (VORs and NDBs already had 2 or 3 letter abbreviations) which led to the loss of such wonderful reporting point names as Killintringham Point, Blackhead Light and Abeam Lichfield East.

Finally, all those lovely low numbers the UK had as the first European users of airways were lost in the late 90s and early 2000s when the airways system was renumbered so that first airway Green 1 ended up as L9, Blue 29 as L608, Amber 25 as N864 and so on.

Great shame but all done in the name of progress.
Pete

Googling brings up the short news item here…..However, Flight’s dire search engine makes finding anything else prior to this date a virtual impossibility.

http://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1957/1957%20-%200190.html

I’ve been deperately trying to find the notes of a talk on the history of ATC in the UK I gave some years ago to a group of distinguished visitors to what was then The London Area Control Centre at Swanwick but with no luck. I remember talking about the implementation of the Metropolitan Control Zone and the first airway (Green 1) which ran westwards from Woodley but I can’t for the life of me remember the date – I think it was 1947.

However, I do know a man who will know. He’s been researching a book on the history of UK ATC for many years and has published several fascinating extracts in ATC magazines such as Transmit and the old CAA house journal in the late 90s

He hangs out at the “ATC Issues” section on PPRuNe as ‘xpz67’ – PM me here if you want to know his real name. I suggest you PM him on PPRuNe and he’ll be able to answer your questions in all the detail you could want.
Pete