A lovely piece of airline ephemera today. An Australian National Airways (ANA) Douglas DC-3 fold-out paper promotional item, offered by the Josef Lebovic Gallery here as part of a set. It consist of a perspective painting of a DC-3 airliner in blue, with a red overprint featuring the Royal Mail cipher and the ANA tail…
Tag: 3D
Forward Pilot
A pilot sculptural bust, near life-size today. Listed by the vendors as a ‘Rare large bronze sculpture of a pilot. Marble base. Excellent condition. Signed in the bronze and engraved “bronze”. Circa 1930. 35cm 30cm 18.5cm. Created by Russian sculptor Ghanu H. Gantcheff. Gantcheff was schooled in Paris and worked in the early 20th century…
Clipper Clobber
From the excellent San Francisco Airport Aviation Museum and Library comes this neat 2013 exhibition catalogue. It serves as an insight to how an assemblage of aviation ephemera and collectables can pull together a good story of a now vanished age, with echoes of some elements of today’s airline experience, but many more differences. The…
Orange Spit
A modern California fruit shipping box today! Aircraft are regularly used as a marketing differentiator, even where there’s no aviation connection. Here’s is a box for California mandarins, ‘Air One’ (Registered Trademark) brand, which has a monoplane fighter on the box – the five blade prop and curves in the fuselage and wings sort of…
Dutch Diana
A fascinating story here. Decorative art on aircraft (usually called ‘nose art’, though for obvious reasons not quite appropriate here) is nothing unusual, but the story behind this, current scheme is, I think, unique. Plenty of art has been copied, or created for a unit by all sorts of people from unit personnel to Disney…
Special KLM Bag
It appears this carry on is no ordinary one, but comes with a particular piece of equipment. Now, I’d have been guessing all day before I got is, so I’ll just reveal all to the left. It’s an iron. I can understand an iron being useful, and as we know they’re a staple in most…
Stork on a Plate
When the Douglas DC-2 of KLM, PH-AJU, named ‘Uiver’, (Stork) came second in the 1934 England – Australia air race, the Dutch, understandably, went wild over the achievement. It was, by any measure an extraordinary achievement, as I detail here on the ABC website. The result of the Netherlands-wide enthusiasm was a extensive array of…
Silver Skimmer
A very accurate sterling silver model of a Saro Skeeter helicopter. Yet another area, that of military mess trophies, that could be an entire blog featuring nothing else. One of the mess silverware items owned by 4 Regiment, Army Air Corps, UK, it was shared by silverware valuer Silverlady on Twitter. A Skeeter would be…
Eastchurch Aviation Shrine
Creating representations of aircraft in stone is very difficult to do effectively, something about the lightness of early aviation and the sharp edges of most aircraft often does not translate well to stone. The Memorial to ‘The Home of Aviation’, at Eastchurch, Kent, UK, is a fascinating effort. Image: Eastchurch aviation memorial. Copyright Historic England…
Albatross? Door. Desk?
Today we have another unusual item. It’s an office table the kind usually advertised as a ‘talking point’ though to be fair to the actual business (First Dibbs) who put it up for sale, they don’t say that. They know those who want one will REALLY want one. Everyone else is probably puzzled. That’s because…
A Year of Aviation Illustration & Art 