The last chronological post* of the blog features a very special item, and some of the fascinating complex background to it – the fictional Carreidas 160 supersonic bizjet. We start with an image of the Carreidas 160 in flight, but all is not what it seems, it’s an excellent creation from here. It was first…
Category: 3D
Santa Baby, Santa Bou
Christmas Eve. Lots of Santa Claus-with-aircraft-posts, but this story from the Aviation Geek club here (do click, have a read, come back) is a fascinating story. In the Vietnam War, an American Caribou transport was painted as a Santa reindeer for Christmas: ‘No group of children ever carried off the fantasy so well. A young…
Avro Claus
Here’s Santa Claus using an aircraft rather than the traditional sleigh and reindeer. This has been a common event in aviation around the world in the modern era, with Santa turning up from the skies in a huge range of different types. This is an early example, with Santa using a post Great War Avro…
Concorde Lives!
It’s the holiday season, and for those using a particular high street travel agent, they may well walk into the branch under an overlooked reminder of a lost glory of airline travel. The Flight Centre logo still features one of the most unmistakable iconic airliner shapes, that of the Anglo-French Concorde supersonic machine. Remember –…
13th On The Nose
Today we are lucky to have a Friday the 13th, so here’s a look at a particularly unusual nose art. We start with a rare wartime colour shot of the nose art on Handley Page Halifax LV907 on public display on the heavily bombed Oxford Street, London. The text: “As ye sew so shall ye…
Real Imperial
The Handley Page HP 42 airliners of Imperial Airways are a familiar sight in the iconography of the interwar airways system as we’ve seen here – their interiors less so. What aspects and details can you identify in the images? Based (as my colleague Juanita Franzi explored so well in her paper at the Aviation…
Indy’s Matte Boat
Of course everyone’s favourite archaeologist, Indiana Jones, travels in a flying boat. In this case in the first film, ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’. But how? Here’s a web page covering a ‘then and now’ of the Short Solent Mk.III that stood in for the extinct Pan Am Boeing 314. It’s the survivor at the…
Visibly Invisibly Wonderful
By special request, today we have Wonder Woman‘s invisible jet. The toy above (image from here on Flickr) represents one vision of invisibility, while the still from the TV series is quite different below, and almost could relate to the popular plastic model kits with see through structures often touted as the ‘Visible ‘or ‘Invistible’…
To the Airport Of Yesteryear
Today’s an airport hotel, a retro effort that my good friend August Horvath brought to my attention on Instagram here. His comment: “I don’t know if the crazy @twahotel venture at @jfkairport will succeed, but it sure is done in style. From the elevator that pretends to be a time machine, to the access tube,…
Vimy Ere – Here!
Today a slightly detailed and slightly-serifed set of letters, almost an abstract design. Because also today, 100 years ago, four young men lifted off in their aircraft from Hounslow aerodrome near London at 8 am on 12 November 1919, and headed to their homeland, Australia, literally on the other side of the world. They’d just…
A Year of Aviation Illustration & Art 