Comments from John Lockwood:
Hi Bernard
Hope you are well. Just read your WikiSita Long journey to
Japan. Very interesting pioneering communications. One thing I
found out early that most of the world’s PTT’s in those days came from the same
egg. Bureaucracy at its worst and you needed to be a psychologist and a
diplomatic to get anywhere. Both aviation and telecommunications have made
great strides together, it’s been a privilege and an experience to have been
involved in those times, now everything is taken for granted without the
knowledge of what was fought for to arrive here today but it’s great to have
had the background participation in it and I would not have changed it for
anything.
John
I joined SITA Paris in June 1978 as an engineer in the Technical Studies department which was then managed by Georges Giraudbit. After developping planning tools for the HLN and later the DTN, I led the design and implementation of the new routing algorithm of the DTN.
Later my team delivered the strategy and specification for migrating the network from airline specific protocols to open standards, and whichalso served for the RFP for the MTN.
After working on developing projects for non-airline customers, I moved to SITA Geneva in 1999, in marketing and later fiance departments.
In 2004 i left SITA to join IATA in Geneva.
With IATA I first worked on launching and developing a new business based on providing credit card payment services to travel agencies. Then I moved to IT, in charge of all data management for successfully.implementing SAP at IATA. Once that project was over I joined the Cargo department at IATA, in charge of Technical developments.
Having worked both at SITA and IATA has been a very unique experience for me!
