The year of reading airmindedly — III
Group biography, airport architecture, and a campaign history. (If it wasn’t obvious by now, I’m selecting these books completely at random!)
Books, Pictures, Reviews
Books, Pictures, Reviews
The year of reading airmindedly — II
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).
1910s, Art, Contemporary, Interviews, Maps, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Pictures
15 minutes of relevance
‘In the future, every historian will be relevant for 15 minutes’, as somebody once said. Here’s my 15 minutes, an interview with journalist Connor Echols for Responsible Statecraft on the parallels between the 1913 phantom airship panic and the 2023 spy balloon panic. As I’ve been busy with other things and have had to watch
Books, Pictures, Reviews
The year of reading airmindedly — I
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
1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, After 1950, Australia, Before 1900, Periodicals, Pictures, Plots and tables, Tools and methods
Breaking the tyranny of distance revisited — II
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.
1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, After 1950, Before 1900, Civil aviation, Grants, Periodicals, Pictures, Plots and tables, Tools and methods
Breaking the tyranny of distance revisited — I
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
Blogging, tweeting and podcasting, Pictures, Tools and methods
At Mastodon
With Twitter’s future looking increasingly nasty, brutish and/or short, I’ve made alternative arrangements for my array of Airminded social media accounts at Mastodon. My main account is: This instance, hcommons.social, is run by Humanities Commons, an open-access scholarship repository (where I already have a presence).
1930s, 1940s, Australia, Books, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Pictures
A miscellany of Australian mystery aircraft, 1903-1940 — III
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.
1910s, 1920s, Australia, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics
A miscellany of Australian mystery aircraft, 1903-1940 — II
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‘.1 This was just before 4am on 22 August 1913,
1900s, 1910s, Australia, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Pictures
A miscellany of Australian mystery aircraft, 1903-1940 — I
It’s been a while since I’ve done a mystery aircraft post, so here are a few Australian ones I’ve been saving up for a rainy day (or days):