UK controlled airspace 1980

Ah, nostalgia! Thank you, I have just spent a happy ten minutes on Memory Lane!

I think you are right that, in many ways it was more complicated, but simpler in others.

The standouts for me were:

1. The loss of so many wonderful airfields north of London – Leavesden, Hatfield, Panshanger all with happy memories.
2. That Southend used to have an SRZ. That disappeared for many years before its ham fisted reintroduction a couple of years back.
3. Yes, more airspace near Shoreham, but at least that meant that we could fly back from the continent on airways without the icing and oxygen.
4. Ah. Free access to Central London. Innocent times :-(
5. Ah. Kent Radar. Still missing. How many other countries fail to provide any radar at all in one of their busiest OCAS areas?
6. No ATZs. That removed so much clutter.
7. Ah. All those now closed RAF bases. East Anglia used to be one big MATZ.

A lot of long lost airfields on that map. Ford, Leavesden, Ipswich, etc etc. On the Military side it’s been decimated; Wethersfield, Coltishall, Bentwaters, Woodbridge, the list is long.

I suspect the controlled airspace is bigger because it was designed to keep a fully loaded DC3 departing on one engine within controlled airspace.

It’s not all got worse. Turweston is marked disused on that chart.

And Spanhoe isn’t even charted (it’s where my LAA inspector is).

I’d love to see a northern England and a Scottish chart from a similar time period.

Peter wrote:

I went there c. 2006 and it still had the original debris covering the runway from WW2

It doesn’t any more. It has a nice grass runway and the hard surfaced runway is a part of the old peritrack and periodically swept for FOD.

I look at that chart and sigh. It reminds me of some of the airspace mess that exists today came out of that.