I admit the term ‘First Blitz’ is a convenient label for the air raids on Britain in the First World War, both as a shorthand and because there really were many similarities with the later Blitz. But nevertheless, I don’t really like it, and I’m avoiding it in my own book on the topic. Why?
John Llewelyn Rhys, The Flying Shadow (Bath: Handheld Press, 2022). John Llewelyn Rhys, England Is My Village and The World Owes Me a Living (Bath: Handheld Press, 2022). John Llewelyn Rees was born on 7 May 1911, got his pilot’s license on 4 July 1934, and was killed in a flying accident on 5 August
When is an mystery aeroplane panic not a mystery aeroplane panic? When it’s a mystery sampan panic, obviously.
After thirty-six (!) months, ‘Spectre and spectacle: mock air raids as aerial theatre in interwar Britain’, my chapter in Michael McCluskey and Luke Seaber, eds., Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain, is now available for a free download under green open access (in this case, pre-copy editing). Here’s the abstract: You can
This is the frontispiece illustration from John E. Gurdon, The Sky Trackers (London: Frederick Warne & Co., 1931). Gurdon was an RFC ace (28 victories, all in Brisfits) and after the war took up writing aviation adventure stories so he could discharge a bankruptcy. The Sheffield Daily Telegraph, noting that ‘Columbus, setting out in a
If you’ve ever read anything about the last great British rigid airships, built between 1924 and 1930 as part of the Imperial Airship Scheme, you will almost certainly have come across a statement to the effect that R.100 was known as the ‘capitalist’ airship and R.101 as the ‘socialist’ airship. This was because the former
Would you? It’s the summer of 1935.((Late July or early August 1935, judging from the August Popular Flying on display. I can’t quite make out the newspaper headlines but the themes (British troops? American naval policy?) could fit late July.)) You’re at Croydon Airport, waiting to board an Imperial Airways flight to Paris. But you
One thing we were curious to try with hota-time is to see whether the idea and the code could be applied beyond looking at London-Sydney travel times. And it can! Here is the output for Melbourne-Sydney travel times, in hours rather than days: Lots of data points, roughly the same as for the London-Sydney plot.
Nearly four years ago, I wrote a post about a software project Tim Sherratt and I were working on for Heritage of the Air called hota-time. Briefly, the idea was that hota-time would extract and then plot travel times between London and Sydney mentioned in Trove Newspaper headlines, as a quantitative way to gauge the
After 1903, 1911, 1913 and 1928, it’s time to round off this miscellany of Australian mystery aircraft with 1939 and 1940 — separated by little over a year in time, but quite far apart in place and circumstance.
