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 […]
This post is about a revelation I had a while back, which those of you with a firmer grasp of the English language than I will think is nothing at all new (and you’re right!) The thing is that I’d always been puzzled by the word barrage. This gets used a lot by journalists: ‘the
The earliest cite for the word ‘airport’ in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1919: 1919 Aerial Age Weekly 14 Apr. 235/1 There is being established at Atlantic City the first ‘air port’ ever established, the purposes of which are..to provide a municipal aviation field,..to supply an air port for trans-Atlantic liners, whether of the
The B-17 is one of the most famous aircraft used in the Second World War. It was known as the Flying Fortress. Or perhaps I should say the Flying FortressTM, for it was actually registered as a trademark by Boeing (well, Wikipedia says so, anyway). The phrase was supposedly coined by a journalist in an
[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] Earlier this summer, I read several studies of national airmindedness, which inspired two previous posts. By way of a coda, here’s a reading list on airmindedness, comprising these works and others I am aware of, along with some scattered thoughts as to what it all means. Joseph J. Corn. The
[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] The kick-off for the football1 World Cup final is only hours away. To mark the occasion, here’s Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard, head of the Royal Air Force, on the correct use of airpower (in 1923, in the context of a hypothetical war with France): Would it be best
If you were wondering what the biggest and loudest air raid siren of all time is, then wonder no more, because it’s the American Chrysler Victory Siren, made in the 1950s. Well, I don’t know for sure that it was — I’d like to see what the Soviets had to offer — but it was
The War Room reports the short list of names for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter: Black Mamba Cyclone Lightning II Piasa Reaper Spitfire II As noted at the War Room, most of these names are really, really bad, and sound like something a 12 year old boy would come up with.1 Of interest here is
Currently, I’m tracing the evolution of the idea of the knock-out blow, the massive aerial bombardment that could knock a country out of the war. Though the idea intself has earlier antecedents, the first use of the phrase itself in this context that I’ve found so far is this, in a well-known (at least to
A flying machine is an aeroplane (qv). A dirigible balloon (or just dirigible) is an airship (qv). An aeroplane is the wing of a flying machine (qv). Airship collectively describes both flying machines and dirigible balloons (qqv). Get it? (Got it.) Good! Seriously, I’m glad the meanings of these words were rationalised within a few
