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Wednesday, August 5, 2009

A Treasure Trove of Aeronautica

If you are an aviation history junkie as I am, you should be certain that you can afford to spend some quality browsing time before visiting the historical archive of Flight International Magazine. You'll find every issue of this venerable British publication (formerly Flight Magazine) from 1909 to 2005, fully digitized and archived as searchable pdf files.
Just to select an example at random, you can read about London's Welcome to Lindbergh as described in the issue from June 2, 1927. The correspondent describes Lindbergh's arrival at Croyden in charming detail, including such tidbits as:
'It may be of interest to add here that in spite of the fact that from the moment "The Spirit of St. Louis" landed it was for a considerable period "under compression" (Lindbergh, we presume, being more or less in a state of "tension") only slight damage was done to the fabric of the tail plane!'
The archive also offers marvelous collections of historical photographs, neatly categorized. Here is an example showing a Fairey Barracuda II that came to grief aboard HMS Ravager in 1944:
And...there is a collection of cutaway drawings of aircraft large and small, that the magazine has published over the years. Here's one of the Cessna 172:
There is much, MUCH more! Enjoy!

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