As I was home all week and did lots of Spring cleaning, I came across a couple boxes of travel brochures and other items I had saved over the years. I’ll set up a more inclusive gallery in the future, but for now here are a few images I downloaded to reminise on.
Piedmont Time-Table 1984
When I first started flying for work in the mid-1980s, I was living in my hometown of Roanoke, Virginia. At the time, Piedmont Airlines was the dominant carrier there so I quickly became a very frequent flyer on them, later to become USAir, US Airways, and soon to become merged with American.
Looking back, I really loved the Piedmont days! In my early years of flying, they were a single class airline – all coach of course. Later they added First Class, and it was really a big step for them. This 1984 time-table showed daily nonstop flights from Roanoke to Atlanta, Baltimore, Charlotte (big hub if you wanted to go anywhere else), Charlottesville, Greensboro, New York, Newark, Pittsburgh Richmond, Tri-City, and Washington DC.
These were the days when you could easily fly from Roanoke to New York, Richmond, Washington, and even Greensboro etc in the morning, and fly back in the evening nonstop – great for the business traveler. Today none of these routes (with the exception of one flight to LGA) exist anymore from Roanoke on US Airways as it has turned into the hub system of flying thru Charlotte or Philadelphia.
Piedmont route system map 1984
Another feature I liked in every airline’s time-table was the airline map, showing where they flew to. Here is Piedmont’s map from 1984: As you can see they initially flew up and down the East Coast primarily, then spreading out to the midwest.
By 1989, when they were acquired by USAir, they had expanded to California and even London. Here is a map from 1989 before they had officially changed names to USAir.
And this is a sign you don’t see anymore on flights: 
I saved many airline timetables over the years, and I’m so glad I did, as they are a long-forgotten travel tool; at least the printed ones shown on this post. Yes, long before the internet, booking flights on-line, checking schedules etc, the time-tables were your sole source of obtaining flight scheduling information short of calling the airlines or travel agents themselves to look up a flight. I liked Piedmont’s simple style time-tables as they had a couple month calendar on the back cover (most did actually), but they also had a measurement ruler too! I don’t think I ever actually used the ruler feature, but I always that that was cool, no matter how basic it was. Yes, these time-tables were our ‘Road Warriors’ first ‘Apps’, long before the iPhone, iPads and tablets first appeared. Here are some more from airlines past and present:
Eastern Airlines timetables Summer 1990
And I will wrap up this post a few international timetables from 1990.
Swissair and ANA timetables 1990
Air Canada and British Airways timetables 1990
To be continued . . .
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Thanks for the images. In 1981 and 1982 I was a proofreader at Dittler Brothers in Atlanta, GA, which printed all the timetables in the country at the time (system and for each individual city), except for American, or maybe it was United. I arrived there just as airline deregulation was kicking in and People Express began changing their fares monthly and weekly. All the timetables like Delta and Eastern that used to print every six months were now printing monthly, and all the cities’ timetables, sometimes no more than a flyer, also had to be updated monthly. Dittler also developed the four-color scratch-off technology that allowed games, so we were also proofreading the first generations of McDonald’s games and lottery tickets for foreign markets. Great training for me, and obviously a very busy time at the plant. Thanks again. If you ever want to know about airline timetable production in the early 1980s, let me know. We were proofreaders, but we basically touched everything from when the typesetting tapes came in from the airlines to when the printed copy rolled off the press.
Hi Bob,
Thanks for the excellent feedback! I never took People Express but I remember looking at their timetable when they first started going to London. So many things have changed in the airline industry due to technology, cutting cost etc, and timetables are missed part of that. Even as a little boy I would dream about all the places I’d love to one day go looking thru them, and I would look up the flights that had ‘Royal Service’, a movie, or even 2 movies! I’m so glad I saved many of these. Thanks again for responding. Steve UNO