Phil Steele's prècis of Dries Bulstra's paper on flight planning prompts me to recall flight planning procedures on the North and South Atlantic in the days of RAF Ferry Command. The sparsity of radio-navigation aids, coupled with few weather reports and even fewer diversion airfields made flight planning and en-route navigation an interesting challenge. RAF Ferry Command rose to the challenge, aided by volunteer captains from American civilian airlines. The catalyst for this success lay in decisions taken in 1935.

The original paper, entitled Flight Planning Before Computers 1946–1959, was written by Mr D. Bulstra in 1995. Written from a civilian operator's point of view, it includes very full explanations of the principles upon which the flight planning techniques were based, including mathematical derivations, examples of meteorological charts, and tables and graphs of aircraft performance. The abridging author has aimed to produce a short and accessible paper that explains the concepts without necessarily involving the reader in further complexities, while departing as little as possible from Mr Bulstra's framework and wording. For those who wish to look more deeply into the subject, the original paper can be seen in the Cundall Library of the Royal Institute of Navigation (Ref. 400.01.14).

It is perhaps appropriate, on this the exact 187th anniversary of the death of Admiral Lord Nelson at Trafalgar and in the year in which so many celebrations have taken place to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival somewhere in the West Indies, to consider the progress which has been made towards international co-operation and achievements in hydrographic surveying and nautical cartography, particularly since the formation of the International Hydrographic Bureau in 1921, and to look at the problems facing international hydrography in the immediate future.