A couple of extremely informative websites I’ve just come across: Airshipsonline, home of the Airship Heritage Trust, dealing with most British airships since 1900 (wot, no Willows airships?); and Imperial Airways, home of the HP 42 project, which aims to build a flying replica of the British Handley Page 42 “Hannibal” biplane airliner of the 1920s and 1930s. If it were my project, I’d recreate one of Imperial’s Empire-class flying boats instead, way cooler than the HP 42 which, apparently, people were embarrased to be seen flying in at the time. They did not compare favourably to all those sleek European and American monoplanes. (On the other hand, Le Corbusier did include a photo of a HP 42 in his 1935 book Aircraft, on aeroplanes as expressions of modernity.) But it’s not my project, and a good thing too, because I haven’t got a hundreth of the energy these guys have - their previous triumph being the Vimy replica I’ve posted about previously. Seriously, I’d love to see this fly. Best of luck to them!
This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Possibly-related posts:
2 comments
Comments feed for this article
Trackback link
http://airminded.org/2005/08/20/airships-and-airliners/trackback/
8 August 2006 at 8:19 am
simon walker
since this article appeared, have you any news on the progress of the hp42 build?
11 August 2006 at 11:37 pm
Brett Holman
Good question, the lack of updates to the site is a bit worrying but a thread on their forum claims that the project is still up and running.