It's the summer of 1935.((Late July or early August 1935, judging from the August Popular Flying on display. I can't quite make out the newspaper headlines but the themes (British troops? American naval policy?) could fit late July.)) You're at Croydon Airport, waiting to board an Imperial Airways flight to Paris. But you were in a rush this morning, and you forgot to bring something to read. According to your Bradshaw's it's a flight of 2 hours and 15 minutes, and you don't particularly want to spend it looking out the window at the ground, so far beneath your feet. No matter, Croydon is fully up to date and has a news kiosk in the booking hall. You wander over to peruse the selection on offer, and this is what you see:
A definite Australian flavour this time, from the Empire Air Training Scheme (as the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan usually isn't known as) to whatever happened after the Empire Air Training Scheme. Plus the book of a certain aviation history blog (remember blogs? Me neither).
2023 will mark 120 years since the first controlled heavier than air flight, and 240 years since the first more or less controlled lighter than air flight. Much more importantly, it's also the year in which I am going to get my ever-growing stack of to-be-read aviation history books under control! I can't promise that I will only read aviation history books this year, but I will mostly. And in the spirit of accountability (as well as content generation), I'm going to list and reflect on what I read here on Airminded (apart from what I'm reading for strictly research purposes, anyway). Starting now...
One thing we were curious to try with hota-time is to see whether the idea and the code could be applied beyond looking at London-Sydney travel times. And it can! Here is the output for Melbourne-Sydney travel times, in hours rather than days:
Lots of data points, roughly the same as for the London-Sydney plot. It does look like there is some sort of trend over time, but it's pretty messy. So let's break it down a bit so we can see what's going on.
Nearly four years ago, I wrote a post about a software project Tim Sherratt and I were working on for Heritage of the Air called hota-time. Briefly, the idea was that hota-time would extract and then plot travel times between London and Sydney mentioned in Trove Newspaper headlines, as a quantitative way to gauge the qualitative impact that aviation had on Australian perceptions of distance -- or, to be more precise, travel time. We (Tim) wrote the code, proved the concept to our satisfaction, uploaded the project, and then didn't get around to writing it up for publication. Which we are now remedying… nearly four years later! (The writing, that is, not yet the publication.)
As part of this process, we've been cleaning up the data and trying some different visualisations. Here's one of the more interesting plots.
This is an updated version of the first plot in the old post, but instead of just lumping all the data together, it is separated out by colour:
dark red: sea, present
indigo: sea, future
yellow: air, present
teal: air, future
That is, present travel times are those reported as actually having been achieved, whereas future travel times have not yet been achieved (usually because they are medium or long-term forecasts, but shorter-term schedule changes fall into this category too). So dark red + yellow tracks actual travel times between London and Sydney, while indigo + teal tracks predicted travel times. Or dark red + indigo tracks sea travel, while yellow + teal tracks air travel.
After 1903, 1911, 1913 and 1928, it's time to round off this miscellany of Australian mystery aircraft with 1939 and 1940 -- separated by little over a year in time, but quite far apart in place and circumstance.
Continuing this miscellany, on 23 August 1913 the Maitland Daily Mercury published a letter from the Reverend G. W. Payne reporting that he, his wife, and a Mr and Mrs Preston had seen 'an aeroplane with searchlight hovering fairly high over Newcastle and the Hunter Valley'.((Maitland Daily Mercury, 23 August 1913, 4.)) This was just before 4am on 22 August 1913, though Mr Preston had also seen the light at 2am on 21 August. What they were all doing at such an early (or late) hour is unclear, but it was 'A reflection of the light on the still waters of the lake' (presumably Lake Macquarie) which first caught their attention:
The four of us watched it traversing a line from the direction of Newcastle north and west. Though at a considerable distance from us and fairly high in the air, the nature of the light was quite unmistakeable. It passed away in a westerly direction after loitering some time over the Hunter Valley.((Ibid.))
