Plots and tables

1910s, Books, Plots and tables

Sykes’s lost squadrons

The Sykes Plan (or Memo, I’ll use them interchangeably here) is an infamous document, at least among those airpower historians interested in the early RAF. Major-General Frederick Sykes was the second Chief of the Air Staff (CAS), that is the professional head of the RAF; the Plan is infamous because it cost him his job. […]

1910s, Archives, Australia, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Plots and tables

When, what, where?

In my previous post, I threatened more statistics about Australian mystery aircraft scares of the First World War, and here they are. What I’ve been doing is collating all the sightings recorded in two NAA files, MP1049/1, 1918/066 and MP367/1, 512/3/1319. The former is the Navy Office’s file pertaining to ‘Reports of suspicious aeroplanes, lights

Aeroplane vs airship, 1900-1918
1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, Australia, Civil aviation, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Pictures, Plots and tables, Tools and methods, Words

Anxious nation? — VI

Looking over the list of Australian mystery aircraft sightings suggests that some generalisations can be made. In the 1910s, mysterious lights in the sky were usually described as being airship-like; after 1910 they were far more likely to be called aeroplanes. Perhaps not coincidentally, 1910 was when aeroplanes first flew in Australia; certainly a search

1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, After 1950, Before 1900, Books, Periodicals, Plots and tables, Tools and methods, Words

The rise and fall and rise and fall of the autogyro

Finally, something to justify the existence of the Internet. The Google Ngram Viewer takes the corpus of words formed by the Google Books dataset (i.e. books, journals, magazines, but not newspapers) and lets you plot the changes in frequency of selected ones over time. There are all sorts of interesting questions you could (in principle)

1910s, Maps, Plots and tables

Finding the target

View Zeppelins over London in a larger map Last year, Londonist gave us a very nifty map of London’s V2 impact sites. Now they’ve come up with an equivalent for Zeppelin raids. Each of the sunbursts represents a bombfall. Clicking on them brings up a popup with information about the site and casualties (but, annoyingly,

1930s, Plots and tables

The far right and the air

One of the questions which interested me when I originally embarked on my PhD was the extent of the relationship between British aviation and the far right. As it turned out, my research took me elsewhere. But that doesn’t mean I can’t blog about it. In the chart above I’ve attempted to show some of

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