...akob: I realize now that the abruptness of my initial post was easily construed as rudeness(and obviously my initial reply), and will try to bear your advice in mind in future. I have little experience with such fora, and the standards which are expected on some of them. Although I realize that there are those who would dispute my competence to make such a judgement, I found your handling of the situation to be exemplary, and feel that you persona...
...nder the impact of what the PRIME MINISTER called a cataract of disaster. Truly, as he said, "never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few." So here too the fighter pilots are just one element of the Few. The other newspapers I've looked at don't mention the Few explicitly. The Daily Express (21 August 1940, 5) barely even alludes to the Battle, saying only that 'the fight which this nation and this Empire is making h...
...h books and other storage and retrieval systems. Both product and basis of human interactions, knowledge has a history. Indeed, human history cannot be understood apart from the history of knowledge. Writing the post gave me the chance to put together a few ideas I had about how and why certain people -- I mostly discuss S. F. Cody, along with Hiram Maxim, Baden Baden-Powell, Claude Grahame-White, P. R. C. Groves, Amy Johnson and H. G. Wells -- ga...
...re. I suggested (and still do) that the aircraft was a 'nod' to the Soviet design - not an actual depiction of an actual aircraft, or indeed an actual factory or women for that matter. As a former graphic designer and illustrator I had a file of reference material either physical or in my head covering styles, machines and similar. These were (like photographs) used to jump-start the creative proess. Indeed I was taught to use these materials to p...
...e seen an Albatros [replica] from exactly that position while it was being run up on the ground. True. But that's not as heroic! Like the eagle. My 1970s New English Library edition of The Riddle of the Sands has a very similar eagle as part of the cover design. Was this a standard version of the German Imperial Eagle? This cover? It does look very similar to the last eagle (other than being reversed), perhaps even identical? Though that picture i...
...etting it to do things (anything) by radio was a first step on the way to true pilotlessness and I think a reasonably impressive one for 1910. Introducing @troveairbot – Airminded […] confident but somewhat premature anticipation of cruise missiles or drones or whatever the analogue du jour […] Australia and the airship — III – Airminded […] But that doesn't mean that Roberts didn't also hope to sell White Australia to the military, which after al...
...emocratic Control, 1935) which I reproduced here (I think it was taken at the same exercise as the top photograph). The Tokyo exercise predates the [...] D00med There is no hope for the human race. Brett Holman You're probably right. In the long run, we're all extinct. Erik Lund So can I have your liver, then? Brett Holman Not yet....
...istry's] experts twenty years too soon, may be one year too late.11 Has a true slip-wing ever been built? P-B mentions precursors such as the Porte Baby/Scout combination and the Short Mayo composite. He didn't consider these true slip-wings, which carried their partners below them, not on top, it being much less efficient to launch an aeroplane up into the air than to drop one downwards. In the Second World War and after, various parasitic aircra...
...d smells of London's docklands on the first night, when warehouses full of rum, paint, rubber, pepper, grain, sugar and tea went up in flames: tea fires, it seems, are 'sweet, sickly and very intense' (25). Then there was the woman seen by one special constable tottering down the street, holding an umbrella and singing 'I'm Singin' in the Rain': but 'The only rain coming down was the incendiary bombs' (44). Of course there are also many stories, s...
...shion (as in flight and, more especially, cabin crew), food, interiors and design (as in corporate branding and aircraft colour schemes). The changing fashions are predictably outrageous -- my favourite would have to be the all-denim look of Denim Air (yes, really) -- and the food options intriguing -- I've never been an airline food hater, and as Lovegrove explains, making more or less palatable food options for hundreds of passengers to be serve...
