I’m preparing for my PhD confirmation, which means I’m nearly a year in. (Eeep!) This means giving a paper (done), writing a report justifying what I’ve done and plan to do, and appearing before a committee to discuss my report and progress. A cynical viewpoint would be that this is just a hoop-jumping-through exercise which […]
I’ve put up a biographical note on the jurist and civil servant J. M. Spaight, an important commentator on airpower issues from before the First World War until after the Second. I should have put this up long ago (Airminded gets quite a few search engine referrals from queries relating to Spaight, and there’s not
[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] … I’m a bad historian! No, well, actually, I have a post included in the latest Carnival of Bad History, which may or may not mean the same thing. Head on over to Hiram Hover’s place and decide for yourself — and while you’re there, make sure you sample the
As promised, here’s a revamped version of the speed plot I did the other day, this time distinguishing between biplanes (and triplanes), monoplanes and jets (just the one — the Meteor). It’s now a bit harder to read, though — it’s still red for fighters and blue for bombers, but now biplanes are represented by
Antony Beevor. The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006. The Spanish Civil War was a crucial event in British airpower history. I have the first edition of this book, but I haven’t read it yet, so … Andrew Milner, Matthew Ryan and Robert Savage, eds. Imagining the Future:
Last year I was playing with a plotting program for Mac OS X, which was pretty good, but not quite satisfactory. I’ve found a better one, Plot, which is free (as in beer), fairly easy to use, and very customisable. It has its own idiosyncrasies, but I like it a lot. Here’s an example plot,
Just as reading Orwell serendipitously led me to a reference to the next war in the air, so too has reading Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Here, Mustapha Mond, one of the Controllers of the world state, gives an impromptu history lesson (I’ve cut out unrelated, interleaved dialogue from another strand of the plot): ‘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
Scott W. Palmer, an associate professor at Western Illinois University, has a new book due out this month entitled Dictatorship of the Air: Aviation Culture and the Fate of Modern Russia. In 10 words or less, it’s about Russian airmindedness up to the end of 1945. This in itself is a good thing, but what
Nevil Shute’s 1939 novel What Happened to the Corbetts is, as you might expect, one of the most well-written of the knock-out blow novels; it’s certainly one of the few that is still read today (outside of H. G. Wells’ three contributions to the genre).1 Shute takes a different approach to most of his predecessors,
