The SSA would do well to emulate Free Flight. Get an editor who is a
soaring pilot, who has a vision of what the magazine should be, and who
actively solicits articles to fulfill that vision. No more of this
"Let's look through this month's mailbag and see if we can find enough
articles to make an issue."

A good magazine does take a lot of footwork - you can't wait for the stories to come to you.

The initial Free Flight archive was relatively easy to put together as I had saved all the PageMaker
files from the time desktop publishing came into its own and I pulled the layout work away from the
printers around 1989. The original files had been chopped up a little (photos, ads removed, etc) to
save space as they were originally saved on diskettes and had to be under a 1.4Meg, but I was able
to reconstruct a portion of these early issues.

Since then I have, as a poster mentioned, simply dropped a pdf of each issue into the
www.sac.ca/freeflight back issues page as they are produced.

The longer job has been to generate pdf files of issues pre-electronic era. The easy way is simply
to scan each page but I decided, in order to make the best copy and to repair old typos and printer
errors, to instead rebuild replicas of the earlier issues. They take a few days each of spare time
when I have nothing better to do. I'm now within an issue of completing 1981 when my wife and I
began editing the magazine and will probably stop there.