A friend bought me an old aeronautical chart he found in a map store. Dated August 16, 1953, it covers roughly the same area as the current Los Angeles VFR [visual flight rules] terminal area chart. In the lower margin are the words: “PRICE 25 CENTS.” You got more square miles for your money then than you do today, even taking inflation into account.
The scene depicted on the chart is at once familiar and strange. Many small airports have vanished; runway diagrams of some larger ones have changed. There are only three VORs [very high frequency omni-directional range]: Long Beach, Ontario, and Palmdale. The airways are 10 statute miles wide—the FAA did not go nautical until the mid-1960s—and they are defined by what look like localizers. They aren’t localizers, however; they’re the beams of four-course ranges.
