This is the story of the world’s first aerial combat. It is not a true story. It is 30 September, 1870. Revolutionary Paris is under siege by Prussian forces. But it has a secret weapon: Nadar. Nadar is famed as a photographer, a writer, and—more importantly here—an aeronaut. He has taken the lead in organising […]
Since last I posted, COVID-19 has continued its spread: the Guardian is currently reporting 378,000 cases worldwide, 16,500 deaths, and 101,000 recoveries. (I post these figures not so much for the information of anyone reading at the present time, but more as context for future readers.) Like most people, I think, I’m coping: healthy, but
[With apologies to Gabriel García Márquez and Ben Wilkie.] It’s not that long ago that I was posting about the Australian bushfires; now it’s the turn of the coronavirus or COVID-19 pandemic, and it’s worldwide. Social media is an essential tool in such times of crisis, but it also can be a misleading one. Here’s
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
This must be one of the first ever photographs ever taken of an air raid, simply because it was one of the first ever air raids, during the Italian invasion of Ottoman Tripolitania of 1911-12. It appeared in the Illustrated London News on 31 August 1912 with the following caption: PHOTOGRAPHED FROM THE DIRIGIBLE WHICH
Heavy rains are finally starting to extinguish the distastrous bushfires that covered a last part of eastern Australia during the last couple of months (and of course, bringing floods). Back while they were still burning, James Raynes tweeted a series of images he adapted from Australian recruitment posters from the First World War, which I
The default explanation for the Australian mystery aeroplane panic of 1918 was a conspiracy theory: they were enemy aircraft, deployed by German merchant raiders operating off the Australian coast, or perhaps flying from secret aerodromes deep in the bush. Either way they were thought to be collaborating with German spies on shore, as evidenced by
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,
Australia is currently experiencing a bushfire season of unprecedented extent and intensity. (See Bodie Ashton’s viral thread for some idea of the scale, bearing in mind that it was written a few days ago. Above is a satellite image from 3 January 2020 of the eastern part of Victoria and south-eastern NSW; Melbourne itself is
Mark Clapson. The Blitz Companion: Aerial Warfare, Civilians and the City Since 1911. London: University of Westminster Press, 2019, https://doi.org/10.16997/book26. Open access has had its travails, but one welcome recent development, particularly in the UK, seems to be the rise of open access monographs and textbooks. An example of the former is Gabriel Moshenska’s Material
