A Soviet poster at the end of Women’s History Month today. A slightly rough translation of this 1931 poster’s strapline would be “Proletarian women! Master aviation equipment, go to school and technical colleges for advancing civil aviation!” The Communist revolution needed to enable such skills and enhance the capability of the population, but here, as…
Month: March 2019
Which Woman’s Wings?
Women’s History Month is nearly at an end. One oddity, here it looks like a great film, lots of American aircraft*. Except it’s not. The US film poster for the British film ‘They Flew Alone’ released in the US as ‘Wings and the Woman’, directed by Herbert Wilcox and starring his wife Anna Neagle. It’s…
Credible Comet?
These ‘trench art’ ashtrays are relatively common in junk shops and antique shops. This is to a degree because most of them are modern made, and vary enormously between the very convincing, and the dubious rubbish. This represents the pre-war de Havilland DH 88 Comet racer, reasonably convincingly though the casting as usual lacks credibility…
Airship Tension
Two artworks showing the experience of operating airships in the Great War, one from the German side, the other from the British. John Lavery’s, ‘A Convoy, North Sea, 1918’ gives a good feel of the vertiginous experience of being suspended between sea and sky while providing an anti-U-Boat patrol over a merchant ship convoy. While…
Want to buy a warplane?
Today’s advertisement seems standard enough. The interesting thing is it’s an advertisement from a German company offering the Henschel Hs 126 military observation aircraft in Flight, the British published aviation magazine, in 1938. Less than two years later British airmen would be attacking the type in Blitzkreg of May 1940. Were Henschel serious about sales,…
Sleek Swift
Today’s image, an advertising artwork for the Supermarine Swift. Unusually for this kind of work it looks to be watercolour, though it may be a wet looking gouache, and unfortunately I can’t make out the signature. It’s a deceptively simple composition, but very effective, and despite the heavy industrial aspects of the image – the…
Special Wings
Something a bit different today, and (yet) another area that could furnish enough interesting examples of the topic to be a blog all of its own. Lapel pins. Here we have Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation (CAC) lapel pins. Interestingly, they feature three types of such pin, the stick pin, here featuring the CAC Wirraway aircraft’s name,…
Time Travel Mechanic?
Today’s is a mystery date poster. Design by Blanche L Anish, this copy held in the US’ Library of Congress. There’s a stamp on the back, ‘July 7 1937’, so the library is dating the image to the thirties, but many details say it’s a much earlier one to me – though civil, rather than…
Fine Nav
This is the artwork painted by Dean Cornwell to be used in a poster for Fisher Bodies, car turned to aircraft makers from General Motors, and entitled ‘On Target’ – a slight misnomer as it actually features the Boeing B-29 Superfortress’ navigator’s station and navigator, rather than the bombardier. It has an intense – almost…
Austering
It’s going to be an Auster anniversary this weekend at the Antique Aeroplane Association of Australia’s annual fly in at Echuca, Vic. So here’s a couple of advertisements for this military type’s transition to civil hands. The Auster J/5 Aiglet Trainer was a civil trainer development of the design, and in the advert above, has…
A Year of Aviation Illustration & Art 