Aircraft

1910s, Aircraft, Other, Pictures

The colour out of aerospace

A recent post on the new science fiction blog io9 (which I’m enjoying, but is it really so hard to put in spoiler warnings?) claimed that the Vickers Velos was the ‘ugliest and most worthless plane in the world’. Sure, it’s not pretty, but I’ve seen plenty that were uglier — fuglier, even. But there […]

Aircraft, Pictures, Travel 2007

A buzz

I’m currently at Hexham in Northumberland, where I’ve been busy touring some of the Hadrian’s Wall sites: Chesters (yesterday), Vindolanda and Housesteads (today). All of which were utterly memorable, and a write-up will eventually be forthcoming; but it was only at Vindolanda that I was buzzed by a very low- and very fast-flying Tornado! It

Aircraft, Pictures, Travel 2007

Early autumn of discontent

Of course. I cancel a planned1 trip to Hamburg for a conference in order to extend my stay in London by 4 days, so I can hit a few more archives and libraries that I really wanted to look at. And what happens? A 3-day tube strike, which started this afternoon and finishes the evening

Aircraft, Pictures, Travel 2007

Science Museum

You want planes? We got planes. After the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum, though really it should be called the Technology Museum as there’s not a lot of what I would call basic science on show (perhaps due to the afore-mentioned Natural History Museum being right next door). Still, that’s just nit-picking, as this

Aircraft, Pictures, Travel 2007

RAF Museum London

On my first Saturday here, I spent the morning printing out pages from the Daily Mail at British Library Newspapers in Colindale, and then headed over to the nearby RAF Museum London for an afternoon wandering around the historic aircraft. The problem with this is that it meant I had to carry with me (a)

1940s, Aircraft, Books, Periodicals, Rumours, Words

An alternative Blitz

Last year I talked about J. M. Spaight’s The Sky’s the Limit (here, here and here), and how its account of the then-developing Battle of Britain was somewhat surprising to anyone familiar with the standard narrative of the summer of 1940. Which is not at all to say that the standard narrative is wrong, just

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