SCRAMBLE turns FORTY!
This month exactly forty years ago, SCRAMBLE started its monthly magazine!
Some volunteers started the magazine with the name 06-24 (after the runway direction of Schiphol airport) in May 1979. In the typed magazine, we published some aircraft movements and news of Schiphol International Airport as well as aircraft movements that were reasonably close to this airport. The first 06-24 had just fourteen pages, all published in the Dutch language and these also contained announcements of some airshow dates.
This information appeared to be a true niche, and the tiny local aviation magazine grew fast into a more professional magazine, still runned by the same volunteers. With issue 20 (January 1981, 44 pages) the magazine was renamed into SCRAMBLE. The name SCRAMBLE was chosen to the well-known military aviation action term: fighter jets of the 24/7 Quick Reaction Alert that were quickly launched to an unidentified intruder. In that era, Soesterberg air base in the Netherlands was home of the US Air Force in Europe 32nd Tactical Fighter Squadron "Wolfhounds", and they just received F-15 Eagles. During the Cold War, these Eagles were very often SCRAMBLEd, so now you know the reason behind the silhouette of an armed F-15 in our recognizable logo. With a SCRAMBLE and that F-15 we easily could identify us, as we spread the aviation news as quickly as possible.
SCRAMBLE grew to an international respected magazine and in our heydays we had worldwide multiple thousands subscribers, and eventually the monthly magazine turned into a full colour English language publication (see http://www.scramble.nl to order it hardcopy or digital).
It is really too much to tell everything about our history as we had so much activities through these forty years: from a digital Bulletin Board System (the first steps into the digital world), to our successful SCRAMBLE Travel Department that offered fully organized travels to many major airshows (worldwide), a massive number of own book publications (see http://www.scramble.nl/shop), Scramble issue 300 (May 2004) that contained 300 (!) pages, and the SCRAMBLE Aviation Hobby Shop, a real store that sold everything you wanted to have to support your aviation hobby. Every year we had several book booth' at many major air shows in Europe and we also ran our own annual fair named SCRAMBLE Air Fete. The aforementioned is just in a nutshell!
After so many years, we are still proud on what we do, and in this digital world we hope to continue our volunteer jobs far into the future! The once tiny spotters magazine turned into a worldwide aviation news source with still a massive number of hardcopy subscribers and almost 53,000 daily followers at social media!
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