I worked for Air France dispatch in KJFK in the west wing of the IAB (international arrival building) in the mid 60's.

This was a dispatch pool of almost a dozen airlines. I worked an IBM-360 with a two foot hard drive and punch cards to load the wind data to produce one of the first computer generated flight plans. The IBM-360 was state-of-the-art in the mid 60's, today you would fall off your chair laughing if you could see it.

The weather maps would come in on a "wet" printer. This was a large format printer that used a rotating drum with an electric wire that would burn in the map data. We had to place the wet maps on a flat surface so they would dry with out tearing. Then we would place a large plastic overlay with the ocean coordinates so we could plot the forecast winds and enter that data on those stupid punch cards. If you dropped the stack of cards while transferring them from the punch machine to the confuser - you would have to start over!  :-[

I remember running flight plans for CC (the 707C that is pictured above) many times. Several times a month one of "Le Pelican" flights would be called "Goldfinger" since it would ferry a lot of gold back to France.

Some of the other airlines were, Lufthansa, Alitalia, Aeronaves de México, Lan Chili, Loftleidir (now Iceland Air), Sabena (now gone!)

I had a great time working there and can tell you Air France was and still a great company.

Air France - les itinéraires plus large dans le monde.

Lou