https://twitter.com/Airminded/status/1288659222431817729?s=20 I’ve made a new Trove bot to accompany @TroveAirBot and @TroveAirRaidBot: @TroveUFOBot. The name is somewhat misleading, since it doesn’t search Trove Newspapers for the keyword ‘UFO’ at all, which turns out to be a bad keyword. Firstly, it’s so short that it frequently turns up whenever the OCR is bad and a random […]
A few months back I wrote about alternatives to the (still missing, still missed) FlightGlobal archive of Flight magazine, a key source for aviation history (for me, anyway). I forgot to mention that Flight‘s great rival, The Aeroplane (founded and edited by the egregious C. G. Grey), is also partially accessible through the Internet Archive.
Last year I looked at a couple of fantastic photographs from the State Library of South Australia’s collection, taken at Harry Butler’s ‘Aviation Day’ display at Unley on 23 August 1919. They’re fantastic because they focus not on the flying but on the crowds watching it. Now I’ve found two more photos taken on the
I’ve remixed Trove Air Bot 2 into a new bot: Trove Air Raid Bot. As the name suggests, this is picking up a different subset of Trove Newspapers articles to @troveairbot, namely those relating to air raids, which it then tweets, one every 30 minutes. In fact, that’s the only key word, or rather phrase,
Since 2007, the FlightGlobal Archive (AKA the ‘Flight archive’) has been an incredibly useful resource for me, many other aviation historians, and Wikimedia Commons, as it provides online access to high-resolution PDFs (with OCR) of nearly every page of the key British aviation trade magazine Flight (from 1962 Flight International), from the first issue in
Last Friday I was privileged to be at the Airways Museum for the world premiere of Out of the Blue? How Aviation Accidents Shaped Safer Skies: Centred on accidents in the vicinity of Sydney’s Mascot Aerodrome, this movie outlines developments in Australian aviation safety from the 1920s to the 1970s. It combines original research, interviews,
Today, a Trove API upgrade, or to be more precise, the decomissioning of the old API, briefly broke Trove Air Bot (and all the other Trove bots). Fortunately Tim Sherratt worked out a solution, and Trove Air Bot is now back in action with all new code, which (with slightly more useful comments) can be
The man: Stanley Baldwin. The place: the House of Commons. The date: 10 November 1932. The quote: I think it is well also for the man in the street to realize that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed, whatever people may tell him. The bomber will always get
From the climactic set-piece at the 1927 RAF Display at Hendon, the destruction of an ‘Eastern village’ by Fairey Foxes — in GIF form:
This is the cover of a leaflet produced in 1916 by the Australian Air Squadrons Fund, the Australian arm of the Imperial Air Flotilla which raised funds around the British Empire for presentation ‘battle-planes’ for the Royal Flying Corps. My interest in it is not so much for its own sake, though I am struck
