Originally Posted by Ice Bear

Appreciate the lesson, but how in the heck did it take til 2000 for someone to contest this?

Secondary question: When did reserve become a thing? Like, was Pan Am rocking flying boat reserves in the 30's?

Originally Posted by Halon1211

Question for all you old timers.

what was Reserve like before cell phones AND pagers? Did you have to pretty much stay inside your house all day long (during your RAP) so you could hear your house phone ring? Or was it a different system back then? Thanks

Originally Posted by NuGuy

This, mostly.

RAPs became a thing after the Whitlow Letter, which was issued in late 2000. Someone had taken it upon themselves to ask the FAA if sitting on-call was an obligation to the Company, and if it was, how could it not be considered duty for the purposes of a duty day.

Whitlow, who was the Deputy Chief Counsel for the FAA at the time said (obviously paraphrasing) "Hey, you know what, you're right. You can't consider time on call as rest. You either need to be given rest prior to the report time of the assignment, or the assignment must fit within the duty day including the on call period".

Needless to say, this seriously blew up the reserve deal as it then existed for the airlines, which was pretty much 24 hour on call, be there in an hour (or whatever your contract said) and it caught them pretty flat footed.

Portable cell phones (to distingush from car phones) really didnt become a serious consumer item until the late 80s. Widespread consumer phones appeared probably about 1990 or so, and you saw the adoption of the classic Motorola "brick" phone running on the old cellular AMPS system (analog). Consumer grade car phones running on the cellular system had been around a few years prior to that, and before the cellular system, a different system (VHF/UHF, straight analog) had been around for car phones going back to the early 60's, but it was nothing like the cellular system, and certainly not consumer grade in any way.

"True" one number service for cell phones, where if you dialed the cell phone number you got the phone where ever it was, didn't really materialize until the late 90s. Before that, you had to call an operator, and "guess" where the phone might be, and they had to try to signal the phone based on your guess. Otherwise it went to voice mail. Yea, it worked, but by and large, cell phones were mostly for being "local".

Beepers have been around for decades, and there were various flavors. "Digital" beepers, where you could enter a call back number started in the 80s, but before that there were the very simple variety that simply beeped, and you either called the answering service (back when that was a thing) or the office that had your number.

Prior to that, yea, 24 hour reserve sat by the phone. Have a loud ringer (which was an acutal bell), and maybe if you were big news, you had a phone out on the porch or garage. Remember, at that time, all phones were landlines, and hardwired. Ma Bell (old school American Telephone & Telegraph) ran the show, owned everything including the lines and the phones, and you had to lease the phones directly from them. They were heavy and built to last by Western Electric (Bell's manufacturing arm). Wireless phones started to appear in the early 80's.

Originally Posted by Cujo665

great explanation but timeline is off a bit. Had a brick cellphone (size of a chalkboard eraser) that worked everywhere I tried it going back to the mid 80's. By the late 80's very early 90's it was pocket size Nokia's. By late 92 it was flip-phones. 2004 ish was the razor. It pretty much stayed that way with just improving coverage until 2007 and the iPhone.

the text messaging pagers helped a lot too.

Originally Posted by sailingfun

A pager was the key to life! The old Bob Newhart show had a neighbor named Howard who was a airline pilot on reserve. He had a phone with a 100 foot long cord. He is always carrying it around on the show. They were really a thing. Pilots in apartments would have cords as long as 200 feet so they could sit by the pool.

Originally Posted by sailingfun

A pager was the key to life! The old Bob Newhart show had a neighbor named Howard who was a airline pilot on reserve. He had a phone with a 100 foot long cord. He is always carrying it around on the show. They were really a thing. Pilots in apartments would have cords as long as 200 feet so they could sit by the pool.

Originally Posted by Halon1211

Question for all you old timers.

what was Reserve like before cell phones AND pagers? Did you have to pretty much stay inside your house all day long (during your RAP) so you could hear your house phone ring? Or was it a different system back then? Thanks

Originally Posted by AirBear

Actually Howard was a Navigator. The show was set in the 1970's so those guys still had jobs.

I started with USAir in 1989. I remember having a pager for the 1st year then switching to a cellphone.

Originally Posted by ImSoSuss

The funniest thing about this thread is that everybody is way off on their cell phone timelines. A case study in the Mandela Effect.