Lunch With Jim Swanson - Early 1990's

[Dave Blake]

Rich Gasperin (SAX002) sent me this message today along with the photo and said I could post it. Click the photo to view it full size.
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While doing a very thorough house cleaning this past weekend, I was going through boxes and trashing a lot of crap, when I came upon a photo in a box by itself. Not two or three or a hundred photos... just this one. And I've been looking for this photo for years!

A long time ago when SunAir was still trying to get it's wings, Jim Swanson suggested that the pilots close to Tampa get together for a brunch. We decided on one of the hotels on West Cyrpess Street and just east of Westshore Boulevard, and not far from Tampa International. It was one of the hotels just below the high school, but things down here change so often it wouldn't be the same name.

It was a great morning, great company and fun conversation, but that's about all I remember since it was in the very early 90's when we were still flying SubLogic. That's me on the left (Rich Gasperin) when I could fit into that striped shirt. Next to me is Mr. T (Taliaferro) and in the middle is Jim Swanson, wearing the famous SunAir Express polo shirt.

I'm at a loss as to the identity of the other three at the table with us.

Feel free to post this, because it is a bit of history and a few of us "old dogs" having brunch with the chief. It was a great time, so long ago.

Rich

[Marty_Becker]

Thanks for sharing that!!!

Do we need to setup an historical archive? I know I have a couple of other photos from 1993 that I have yet to find, in addition to the one I posted in this forum and the newspaper article from the St. Lous Post Dispatch.

[scorpio]

Oh those were the days....

I was fortunate enough to meet with Jim and his wife in Tampa while my wife and I were on a trip to the U.S. in 1993 or 1994 and I can recognize Jim´s wife Carol as the second person from the right. I do not know any of the others in person, except Jim in the center.

I hope to be able to find some more photos perhaps or old documents from the early days of Sunair Express, but I came in contact with Jim and Sunair only in the summer of 1992 when a bunch of pilots moved from Prodigy to Compuserve where we had set up a similar operation under the name CISAir... It is really strange to have two VAs springing up more or less at the same time and based on the same flightsimulation program, ATP from Sublogic. There was nothing else around in those days and the first 3 versions of Micorsoft´s "Flight Simulator" were simply rididulous attemps in our eyes....
CISAir [for C(ompuserve) I(nformation) S(ervice) Air(lines)] only had a few flights in California and the West when Sunair Express came over with a full lfedged hub in TPA and we joined forces and merged both operations in August 1992.
Another group of pilots had "split off" and chosen AOL as their BBS system and so we had two parallel operations to be coordinated in those days with Dave Blake and James Bond on AOL and Jim and myself on Compuserve.

There we also met Simon Hradecky from Salzburg in Austria, who wrote a few interesting programs for us one of which even carried on its name from CISAir into Sunair. It was used to assign check rides and later view them on the "instructors" screen, and it was used in the process of accepting new pilots into the VA.
Simon later developed add-ons to enhance the screen resolution (3-DAGS) and a tool to edit most everything that you might want to edit among many other useful tools. This tool became known as ATPUTILS and is still available on his website for use with AS2, the successor of ATP developped by him. You can visit his website here: http.//www.nomissoft.com

I would like to see an archive being created here and hope that Marty will find more documents from those early days of our VA.
Dave published an early version of our pilot manual here too, and it is things like that which help us to see the huge progress this "industry" has made over 15 years.

Thanks to everyone who can contribute to these Historical Archives.

Best wishes to all,
Juergen

[lental]

Rich, Marty, et al --

I thank you so much for posting that photo. I can't believe that, old as I am, I remember more about the circumstances than do you...hee, hee.

First, it wasn't lunch, it was breakfast. Second, Jim had not put out the call for a meeting, I had planned on being in the Tampa area for the St. Pete Boat Show and stayed at the Embassy Suites (on Cypress, you got that right) which is now the Executive Suites (I think). I contacted you both and suggested we meet for breakfast because, though we had had numerous conversations via the internet we had never met in person. In fact, I had even agreed to pay for breakfast but, as it turned out, the Embassy Suites provided a free hot breakfast for their guests and it didn't cost me a nickle. As I recall it was not too long after you (Rich) had moved back into your house after the tornado.

In any case, it was a truly enjoyable occasion. Unfortunately, it was just a few months before Jim's death and I think he was aware, at the time, of his terminal condition, though he never let on.

The people in the photo are (l to r): Rich Gasperin; me; Jim; Jerry Albritton (who accompanied me to the boat show), a builder and historial restoration expert (now deceased); his wife, Grace and my wife Marcia. The photo was shot by your wife.

Sadly, I think this is one of the few occasions that Jim got to meet his "people" face-to-face. For me, it was one of the highlights of my life considering what transpired a short time later, i.e., the Prodigy fiasco and Jim's death. All that followed rather quickly, too quickly, after this wonderful occasion.

I truly appreciate your posting of it.

Len Taliaferro
Mr. T
SAX Pilot 004

P.S. (for Marty and Rich) Jim was Pilot 001. I was Pilot 004. Who were Pilots 002 and 003?

[lental]

Scorpio --

I truly appreciate your posting, but it now begs the question as to when Sunair was actually formed. I have just assumed that 1992 was correct. However, I remember flying lines as a pilot as far back as 1990 or 1991, maybe even earlier. Sunair ran very successfully on Prodigy for quite some time, expanding to include its commuter airline before Prodigy attempted to raise its rates.

Sometime ago, I sent to someone with Sunair a batch of printouts or messages and other conversations on Prodigy well before Sunair broke up into many pieces because most of us could not afford the new rates. As I recall, I calculated that my cost on Prodigy would go from $12.95US per month to about $112.00 just for my Sunair activity.

This leads me to believe that Sunair may actually have been founded before 1992...maybe more like 1989 or 1990.

Can anyone help here?

Len Taliaferro
Sunair Pilot 004

[Marty_Becker]

I always thought that Jim was pilot number 911; as in, you could always call on Jim for help.

[Dave Blake]

This leads me to believe that Sunair may actually have been founded before 1992...maybe more like 1989 or 1990.

Can anyone help here?

Len Taliaferro
Sunair Pilot 004

I always thought that SunAir Express begain by using subLOGIC's ATP flight sim program. ATP was released in 1990. So I don't see how SAX could have started any earlier than late 1990 or maybe in 1991 unless it started with using Microsoft Flight Sim.

[lental]

Dave -- As I recall we got started six to eight months before the Prodigy debacle but my memory could be a bit foggy. Most of us were flying ATP but we still had some who were flying Flight Simulator. In fact, I think I may have, in the beginning, been using Flight Simulator with an add-on ATC called Radar contact. However, ATC was not at all critical. What ATP gave us was a way to get pilots certified that I don't think was available in Flight Simulator.

We were fairly rudimentary in the early days.

Jim set up flights in two or three legs and you had to fly out of the hub to the final destination and return to complete your line for the week. Every one was expected to fly at least one line per week. You could fly extra lines for extra credit which a lot of us did.

Those flights had to be made within reasonble fuel guidelines and arrive on time. Jim and others calculated the anticipated fuel requirements for each flight so there was a target to shoot for. You got extra credit for using less fuel than had been established for the line.

We would then set real life weather conditions in ATP including the winds aloft by reading coded metars from a NOAA pilot's site. Then altitudes for the flights were based the FARS and wind conditions. Those were at the discretion of the pilot. Sometimes you could find favorable winds at one flight level for the outbound flight and favorable winds at another level for the return. We established the active runway based on ground level winds. If ground level winds were less than 10 knots we could use a runway of choice which nearly everyone did to save fuel.

I don't remember that we used ATC at all. Obviously we did't have GPS then so we flew VOR to VOR, using, in some cases, NDBs as well.

I wish I could remember who I sent that stuff to a year or so ago. It included original messages and conversations between Jim and me and others. Those messages all had dates and times on them and could very well pinpoint more reliably when SAX actually got off the ground. I certainly think it was closer to 1990 than to 1992. One reason I say that is because I had a major job change in October of 1991 which would have severely limited my participation but I was already well out of it because of the change from Prodigy to Compuserve. Howver, Jim and I maintained our communications until his death.

I guess, in the greater scheme of things, a precise start-up date for SAX is really inconsequential. The really important thing is that you guys have it going and for that you are to be congratualated.

Mr. T
Len Taliaferro
Original SAX Pilot 004

P.S. Marty. As I recall, Jim often was not much help at all. I remember numerous times asking him what I should do about something or other. His response was usually, "What do you think we should do?"
Wnen I gave him my answer, he would say, "Well then, do it that way." He did have knack for making you help yourself.

[Al O'Brien]

Was going through some of my old papers and came upon one of Jim Swanson"s first flights for Sunair. I have scanned it and have uploaded it as a JPG. And yes Marty he evidently did go by 911 in the beginning.
Enjoy Al

[Scorpio47]

Gentlemen:

after having been offline for quite some time while we were travelling across Europe in our motorhome I just filed another pirep and now jumped into the forum to get the latest....

I stumbled over this thread (again) and here is what I remember about the early days:

I was a member of the Compuserve Inoformation Service since 1988 or so and when ATP came out in late 1989 there was some activity in a section called FSFORUM on CIS. David Bolenbaugh and myself plus one other pilot whose name I unfortunately cannot remember had developed the idea of using ATP (by Sublogic) and with the help of Simon Hradecky who developed a program to edit the assignments were able to set up our own assignments in ATP and named our little airline CISAir. I do not recall the exact dates but it must have been in the fall of 1991 or spring 1992.

Then, in the summer months of 1992, a group of pilots joined Compuserve under the leadership of a certain "Jim in TPA"... They had been active on Prodigy but for reasons I do not know much about they moved over to "our" provider CIS only to find that there too were some pilots flying ATP in a structured way and even using a tool by Simon to create their own assignments.
Jim and myself then agreed to merge our operations and preserve the name they were alredy using, namely Sunair Express Virtual Airlines. In August 1992 this merger was officially enacted and Jim took on the task of CEO whereas I was named president of this VA. Simon Hradecky became honorary member and has always supported ATP and Sunair. Even now he still offers his tools to the public and has already published a successor to ATP under the name of Airline Simulator 2. As far as I know the successor AS3 is close to being released. You can find more on this here: http://www.nomissoft.com/.
In fact Simon continued to host FSFORUM after CIS had been bought by AOL and closed that forum. His version can be found here: http://webx.simpilot.net:8080/cgi-bin/W ... 6@.ee6b4f5

OK, back to history:
as far as I can recall the move from Prodigy to CIS was not made by all members of the Sunair group that existed in early 1992 and some of them moved to AOL, among them were Dave Blake and James Bond who set up a parallel operation on AOL and were cooperating with us on Compuserve but had their own organisational structure and procedures for pireps etc.

When the internet was born discussions started to move our VA into that new medium, but there were many arguments against that move as well as against the use of Microsoft's Flight Simulator. We did not have any experience with http and all those things needed to set up a web page and MSFS did not offer the assignment feature which was essential to our operation procedures....

It was thanks to Dave and James however that the move to the internet was done and they were the backbone of that new version which ensured the survival of Sunair until today!!

So, I think we all owe a BIG THANK YOU not only to Jim Swanson as our founder and promotor of the early days, but also to Simon Hradecky and in particular to James Bond and Dave Blake for their vision and dedication which have made it possible for us to still fly for the very first VA ever!

Thank you, Dave! Without you there would be no Sunair Express VA today!

Cheers to all and "keep ' em floying"!
Juergen

[kdundon]

Mr T. for yours and others information we moved from Prodigy to CIS because Prodigy was changing their pricing policy. Oh, were those the days. I was 007 and somewhere in my mess of a computer room I bet I can find some old emails. I shall have to look. Ken

[chriszdc]

I found you guys on AOL in early 94, it was a bulletin board thingy if I remember correctly. Wow, time flies when you're having fun

[779]

Wow.
I came into Flight sim before I actually took my first actual intro-flight at the local airport near my home.
I got MSFS for the Amiga 1000 back in the late-90's and thought that was =the thing=
Reading these posts from back then along with the nostalgia associated with them really makes
me happy I went this direction for a VA instead of all of the "others" which proliferate the net.
Flying is my passion and seeing the history behind the scenes where people actually got together
to meet and 'Lunch' or ..Breakfast.. is a testament to the dedication that is so lacking in today's VA.
Keep up the good work - all of you - and know that although SunAir is small in scope, it is has a great big heart.

Fred Myers
SAX779