One fascination I and many friends seem to have is aeronautical charts, especially old ones. If you look closely at a sectional from, say, the 1960s, you’ll immediately notice that they’ve gotten more complicated over the years. That’s an inevitable outcome from more airplanes and people flying in comparison. Cities and towns have grown, highways built, etc. Another thing you might notice is that the basic colors and symbols used back then are still employed today. There’s a lot less magenta and more blue, denoting airspace changes, plus a few more symbols and a lot more text. All of which are ways in which charting has evolved over the last 50 years.
The biggest change in charting, of course, has been the shift from paper to pixels. As a renter, I used to carry around a huge briefcase to organize the instrument and visual charts I needed for my normal stomping grounds. Today, of course, I can have charts for every airport in the world on a cell phone. I can search for everything I might need with a couple of taps instead of reaching into the back seat for something I left in the car. They’re geo-referenced to show me where I am on the map, and I can zoom in and use night mode, among other useful features.
