This past week I came across a charming article in our local paper which I am sure will be of interest to our global travelers, especially those who’ve been flying for years. It related the story of 59-year-old Nigel Reading, a current resident of Vancouver, B.C., who had flown into our modest airport to visit some friends. Accompanying Nigel on this short flight, as it has on every flight he has taken over the past 50 years, was his Junior Jet Club Log Book, provided by the British Overseas Airways Corp. (BOAC, now British Airways).

The well-worn cloth-covered book, held together with tape and logging 1.3 million air miles, records the dates and mileage of each journey, the aircraft and registration, departure city and destination. Reading received the book on his first flight, on Jan. 8, 1963, when he flew from his London boarding school on a holiday break to visit his father, a British Army brigadier general stationed in Aden (now Yemen). Children’s log books would be collected by a stewardess who would deliver them to the cockpit to be signed by the captain. Over the years, this traveler has flown to far-flung destinations and maintained his chronicle, collecting the signatures of 637 pilots — along with many personal messages from them — along the way.

While many who received such log books as child passengers dropped the habit of recording their adventures in the skies as they grew older, Reading kept on and now has a fascinating record of his travels which is the envy of many of the pilots and other aviation aficianados who’ve seen the book. If you’d like to see images of the log book, look here.

I’m curious whether any of our readers recall having one of BOAC’s log books, or one from another airline. Do you still have it? Do you make an effort now to formally record your flights for other than expense account or tax records? For those interested in learning more about the Junior Jet Club, Janet Eastman’s article in the Medford Mail Tribune offers a Facebook BOAC Junior Jet Club page link and one to a Web page about the club.

— Patty Vanikiotis, associate editor/copy editor