Some more plots from the talk I gave the other way. I was trying to think of a way to illustrate in concrete terms the problem of speed for the air defence of Britain. I came up with the following: Simply put, it shows the length of time it would have taken for an attacking […]
Via Museum of Hoaxes, the Nazi air marker hoax — though it seems to me that it was not a hoax in the sense of a deliberate attempt to deceive, but rather an honest misinterpretation. And taking into account the role of the press in the story’s rise and fall, it looks a lot like
A GIANT OF THE AIR. A HANDLEY-PAGE FOUR-ENGINED BIPLANE. A Handley Page V/1500, the Kabul bomber. Below is (I think) a S.E.5a. Image source: Harry Golding, ed., The Wonder Book of Aircraft for Boys and Girls (London: Ward, Lock & Co, 1919), frontispiece. Painting by Geoffrey Watson.
Source: Department of Veterans’ Affairs, Australia.
This will end in tears: Zeppelins to make tourist flights over London. (Via Airshipworld.) Image source: from the front cover of Louis Gastine, War in Space: or, an Air-craft War between France and Germany (London and Felling-on-Tyne: Walter Scott Publishing, 1913). (OK, it’s Paris, not London — so I cheated.) The oldest paperback I own,
The Royal Air Force is 90 years old today. It was formed from the merger of the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service on 1 April 1918 (yes, April Fool’s Day), as the result of an Act of Parliament. This was historic. The RAF may not have been the world’s first independent
A curious snippet from Margaret MacMillan’s account of the Paris Peace Conference, Peacemakers (2002): Why not give it to Hughes of Australia, suggested Clemenceau.1 The ‘it’ was Heligoland, a small island in the North Sea, off the north-western coast of Germany. For most of the 19th century it had belonged to Britain, which swapped it
In 1923, the Salisbury Committee enquired into the proper relationship between the RAF, on the one hand, and the Army and Navy, on the other. According to Andrew Boyle’s biography of Hugh Trenchard, the then Chief of the Air Staff quoted a recent statement by Sir Ian Hamilton (the commander at Gallipoli) at some point
I’ve finally gotten around to adding Montagu of Beaulieu (pronounced ‘Bewley’, apparently) to my irregular series of biographies of airpower propagandists. He’s an important, but somewhat neglected figure, some of whose papers I’ve examined (those held at King’s College London). He helped found the Air League of the British Empire in 1909, and devised the
[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] Not a phrase I ever expected to come across, but here it is, in David Omissi’s Air Power and Colonial Control, the context being the introduction of one the most successful aircraft of the interwar period, the Hawker Hart: The Hart was soon found to be suitable for India; fifty-seven
