Spotted in Feb 2020 (post backdated to 2019!) by Hayden Bruce in Perth, WA, is this full-on aircraft graffiti. Not immediately obvious is that it’s an adaptation from one of the many box-top artworks from the Revell 1/72 kit 04678 of the Focke-Wulf Fw 200 ‘Condor‘. Impressive effort! Anyone with more info on it, please…
Category: Ephemera
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…
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 –…
Zepps! Gorilla!
I promised something more cheerful today, so here we are. Today’s pulp cover is the unarguably excellent ‘Zeppelin Stories’, this issue featuring ‘The Gorilla of the Gas Bags’ by Gil Brewer. With a cover like that, you know it’s going to be all good stuff inside, right? A bit of background from the website ‘The…
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…
They Who Look
In World War Two, the British aircraft parts company Helliwells used a series of images of a nude female model to promote their work – no other evident reason beyond the obvious one! However it certainly ensured their advertising stood out from the rest. They often (but not always) used the tagline ‘They Who Look…
Double Cross
A pair of images showing preliminary designs and final artwork by the doyen of UK box art, Roy Cross. Above is the original design for the Airfix Beaufighter and Me 109G.6 ‘Dog Fight Double’ set – note how the final art has the Reich defence rocket tubes under the wings, as per the original kit,…
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…
Tomorrow Never Comes
Following yesterday’s post featuring both airliners that didn’t make it, or never came to reality (as well as some that did) today here’s a proposed airliner that seems a lot more credible a design, though it was also never to become real – yesterday or tomorrow. An advertisement for Cunliffe-Owen Aircraft Ltd, a company that…
Bristol Fashions
Leading today with a simple, but effective poster from the Bristol Aeroplane Company (from here) at a 1950s SBAC Farnborough airshow. I presume the flag is Bristol’s own house standard, and note the ‘Bristol’ logotype we discussed earlier here. From the top, the aircraft depicted are the Bristol Type 167 Brabazon, Type 175 Britannia, Type…
A Year of Aviation Illustration & Art 