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…
Tag: America
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…
Back in Short Trousers
We’ve seen the work of the great American magazine illustrator Leyendecker here and here, so it’s appropriate we feature another great American illustrator, the one and only Norman Rockwell, on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post, on 15 December 1945, after the end of World War Two. Like most of Rockwell’s art, it…
Man & Prop
An aquatint artwork today. Aviation seems to have only made the margins of fine art, like most forms of modern transport. Here’s an example which could almost be in a Renaissance collection. Entitled Propeller, 1934, William Heaslip, Associated American Artists, etching and aquatint on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum (link). Artistically, it’s an interesting composition….
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…
Camo from the Copy
Today an advertisement thanks to Airminded on Twitter. As well as the proposition (‘call us to camouflage your buildings or they may get bombed’, – definitely not a “nice factory, be a shame if something HAPPENED to it” angle of course!) the aircraft caught my eye. It’s not a German type, despite the prominent Swastika…
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…
Uniting Nations
Today’s Poster. We are all familiar today with the organisation the United Nations. What’s less well known is the name dates back to the stage of World War Two when the Axis powers had united many of the rest of the world against them. From Wiki: “On New Year’s Day 1942, the Allied “Big Four”…
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,…
A Year of Aviation Illustration & Art 