Change In The Air

- Dan Booth

The other day while thumbing through some official looking government documents, I ran across these words on an otherwise empty sheet of paper: “This page intentionally left blank.” Does anyone else besides me stop to ponder the irony? For one thing, the page has not been left blank, intentionally or otherwise; it’s got those words printed on it. And what would the page look like if it had been unintentionally left blank?

Among the documents in that same dusty filing box was an FAA publication from 1990 entitled The National Airspace Plan. The rather impressive tome laid out step-by-step the proposed implementation of several interwoven technologies that would vastly improve the efficiency of air traffic in the US. In its day, it was the height of visionary problem solving for a very thorny issue.