"That big gray file cabinet sat beside my desk, but I hadn’t opened it in at least 10 years. Technically, it wasn’t mine. It belonged to my predecessor, and he was a bit of a pack-rat.

When he left the company, he also left the journalism profession, so he bequeathed his copious and neatly organized files on his somewhat dazed and ill-informed successor. I started at Flightglobal 15 years ago, and that file cabinet was my secret weapon my first few years on the job. This was in the era just before the great digitization of all important documents. Paper still was king.

Those hanging, green file dividers contained all manner of necessary materials: Specifications, high-resolution photos and printed out copies of those impressively informative press conferences of yesteryear, before the industry’s corporate lawyers decided basic information about their products was intellectual property, guarded with more jealousy than the gold at Fort Knox.

After a few years, of course, the relevance and currency of the information stored in that file cabinet had run its course. I had filled up an adjoining file cabinet with fresh material on a new generation of programs, like KC-X, and JSF, and JCM and, well, KC-X again. But I never threw out any of my predecessor’s stuff.

A decade or so went by and eventually our company bought another company. Somebody noticed we now owned two offices in the metropolitan DC area, so one had to close down and consolidate with the other, and that was our office. So, for the first time in more than a decade, I opened my predecessor’s file cabinet. It was no longer my secret weapon. It was instead a time capsule of the aerospace industry circa the late 1990s and 2000s.

File names that once bore so much importance—Comanche, MC2A, BRJ-X, LOCAAS—now seemed like lost relics of a different era, preserved on an irrelevant medium like paper. It probably took me three or four times the minimum required to go through all that period, but I didn’t mind it at all."