So with ninety something days to go, what will COP26 bring – well other than herds of plane spotters. There are supposed to be some 200 countries in attendance, providing thousands of delegates. I’m not sure that that all fits in well with the objective of the conference, but I will be glad to see a reasonable selection of aircraft in the event that the delegates arrive by air.

I would expect the distribution of visiting aircraft to be spread over the three major central belt airports, but I guess that you can never be sure on that score.

As to the plane spotters and the photographers, I’m expecting a surpluss of them to attend. I expect that there will be people from all over the country, hoping to log or photograph some interesting visitors.

What will COP26 achieve, I seriously doubt it will achieve very much. But you can bet your bottom dollar that the politicians will tell us all how much of a sucess it has been, regardless of the outcome of the whole thing.

I think that there can be little or no doubt that there is climatic shift in the UK, it seems to be pretty marked in other parts of the world as well. So our generation and the preceeding generations have screwed things up, the generation that will have to fix it has been home schooled by a bunch of alcoholics – I expect it all to go pretty well then!

An earlier post and a followup conversation has prompted me to look a bit further into what aviation information has been lost from the online world. There were a number of dedicated BBS devoted to aviation in general, these were more popular in the USA but there were a number in the UK and Europe.

With the advent of USENET and some of the other services like Compuserve, the BBS slowly fell out of favour. The bulk of the information on the BBS servers has gone, few were backed up to anywhere accessible and many were just turned off and forgotten about.

So how serious a loss is this? To put things in perspective, I started using BBS services in the late 70’s and there was a wealth of information and knowledge on these services – although sometimes not easy to find.

The people who contributed to the knowledge base, they were people who had actually been there in a number of cases and they were pretty passionate about the information that they held. But few of the BBS services were moved to services like USENET, although some people did cross post.

There were BBS servers with very specific groups, covering subjects as diverse as US fighter aircraft in Europe. All the way up to current (well current until the advent of the internet) aviation activities, the community was very helpful and many people were members of multiple services.

Sorry to say I think that much of the information and many of the people are now and forever lost in the mists of time.

Over the past few days I’ve watched a mini flame war erupt on the ScotAvNet Google Group, these are not that uncommon in the online world. Essentially they usually revolve around some slight, either percieved or actual. Sometimes they are simpler, in as much as someone takes the hump about something or someone.

But in the long run, they do the online community no favours – simply put they are fractious and eventually kill the community spirit. The question that I would ask is where were the moderators when this was going on?

The group is unmoderated, which keeps the owners of the group in the clear legally. But without moderation, these groups can degenerate into a Bun Fight where everyone is a loser.

I have been around the Internet or World Wide Web since before it was, I have been a user of the resource since its inception and used a number of dialup Aviation BBS services before that. At their peak there were probably in excess of twenty thousand BBS’s, of these there were tens and possibly as many as a hundred purely devoted to Aviation.

As to what happened to them, well in the early 90’s what we now call the Internet or World Wide Web came along and the BBS and the millions of posts that they held went the way of the Dodo. With very little being preserved in any form, I was a member of a number of these bulliten boards and some had several hundred thousand posts.

My first dedicated service (what would now be called an ISP) was Compuserve, joining in 1982 – why did I join. What made it apealing to me was access to the Airline Ticketing system S.A.B.R.E., where the bill for tickets and some hotels came in at the end of the month from Compuserve – this could be some time after the flights or hotel visit.

But back to the gist of the post I guess, many of these BBS were run on machines owned by individuals and accesed using a dialup modem. Where like minded individualls could contribute and in many cases speak to people who had first hand information. To my knowledge, very little of this information was saved and joins the other information lost forever.

In the last year I have moved from Skye where I was a regular visitor to a number of local-ish airstrips, I was a frequent visitor to Ashaig or Broadford and Plockton and was at times surprised by the visitors that arrived there. What was much more surprising was the percentage of visitors that were not officially recorded, I would estimate that between 30 and 50 percent of visits went unrecorded at Broadford.

Not that Broadford was a busy airstrip, the most visitors seen there were a dozen Robinson R22’s on the ground together and at Plockton about seven or eight aircraft. But I have seen RAF C-130’s doing touch and goes at Broadford, which came as quite a surprise – and is probably not recorded anywhere else.

Once the commecialisation of the Internet began in the early 90’s there were a number of associated problems that came with it, primarily if people weren’t prepared to pay for the hosting of information – then it vanished. How much has gone, estimates vary but likely a quarter of what has been out there is now gone. In the 43 years since I first went “Online”, I have seen much disappear and expect to see much more go the same way.