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: Heraldry
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…
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…
The SLV’s Dutchmen
Currently on at the State Library of Victoria (re-opening today) is the ‘Velvet, Iron, Ashes’ exhibition, which among several other great things contains an excellent selection of items relating to the 1934 MacRobertson air race. The display includes a newsreel highlights, and the promotional poster (seen above) as well as one of the many route…
Fashion Roundels
A magazine cover today, from Paris, 1916. In fact Saturday 25 November, where the Great War had been going for two years, and aircraft marking were well established. Magazine ‘La Vie Parisienne’ (‘Parisiene Life’) has an amusing looking cover. The woman, perhaps a ‘light skirt’ (a loose woman) given she’s showing her slip and stocking…
Wing Badges n’ Things
Today we have an accidental product of my job, reporting on aviation preservation worldwide. Relatively recently, two major transport, technology and heritage collections on opposite sides of the world changed their logos. The Shuttleworth Collection, in Biggleswade, Bedfordshire, UK, adopted a newly designed brand logo: I immediately though it seemed familiar (though there was no…
Firebomb Fritz
A wartime British defensive propaganda character (mostly forgotten today) was ‘Firebomb Fritz’. Here in colour: …and here in black and white, both by Reginald Mount. (Original UK National Archives caption: “Fritz in Nazi bomber” by Reginald Mount, 1942 Catalogue ref: INF 3/1421. The cartoon depicts determined (but subservient) looking German air force men flying towards…
Get A Pilot Husband
Today’s cover illustration, The Australian magazine Woman’s Day and Home, November 20, 1950. Often unintentional ironies appear in coverline clashes in magazines, but this one has also become slightly more intense with time. A little serious insight to the reality behind being a ‘cover star’. Doug Morrison writes “Old friend Max Garroway 2nd from right….
A Year of Aviation Illustration & Art 