Today’s illustration is a nicely designed foldout timetable. This is the Imperial Airways winter timetable for 1931-1932 and shows the iconic Handley Page HP-42 airliner as used on the then long range routes to Africa, India and the Middle East. The unnamed artist has pulled off a very neat, simple-seeming yet complex design, using the…
Tag: Inter-war
A Danish Window
Today’s Poster is a 1930s example from Det Danske Luftfartselskab (DDL, Danish Air Lines) DDL was merged in 1951 into the Scandinavian Airlines System (SAS). The passenger looking out of the window trope has been used a lot, but I think this is unusual in having an aircraft outline overlay. It’s also one of the…
10me Salon
Today’s Poster. R de Valerie, I think is the artist, and advertising the 10me Salon de Aviation at the Grand Palais, Paris, France, in December 1926. Despite the soaring aircraft, it was a static, trade show. But what lovely colours. James Kightly, Vintage Aero Writer. Author’s collection.
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…
Fine Frobisher
Today’s Poster is one of a series of Imperial Airways posters of the late thirties featuring their notable fleet of aircraft types, presented in cutaway form, a previous example shown on the blog, the Shorts C.30 flying boat being seen here. This time its the remarkably elegant de Havilland DH 91 Albatross four engine airliner,…
Posters of Interesting Times
Today’s Posters are a set of Chinese aviation instructional posters, an to western eyes, a very different mix of style, content and approach to anything we’ve seen here before. This one below of ‘Active Air Defences’, with the Smithsonian’s source detail here. Is it meant as a ‘how to behave?’, or ‘how you are being…
Toil & 2
Today’s photograph. I particularly like Twenties and Thirties artistically composed photographs featuring aircraft in a semi abstract composition, such as the Messerschmitt photograph on 9 April. Here we have an image entitled ‘Rest after toil.’, and the details and reflections make it almost into a person on a mountain summit image. The reality is the…
But wait! Balloon Races!
Today’s Poster. A classic interwar post art deco design in 1933, featuring an eagle, Gee Bee and allied racers – and a balloon race! Well there y’go. James Kightly, Vintage Aero Writer. From the Smithsonian’s online catalogue here. Sponsor: Chicago Daily News, Other: National Aeronautic Association. Medium: Poster, Advertising, Air Shows and Races. Dimensions:…
Seeflug
Today’s Poster ‘Deutscher Seeflug 1926’ (German seaplanes 1926) by Walter Hemming. A deceptively simple poster with blues and browns, it features a biplane wingtip in the foreground and a biplane and monoplane flying above the sea. Strangely,, given the subject and the ocean, no evidence of floats of flying boat hulls are evident, nor are…
Ibero-Americana
You might think the combination of historic sailing ships and aircraft (as seen in the recent KLM ‘Flying Dutchman’ post) would be unusual, but today’s poster follows the theme, albeit is from Spain, and for an event, rather than an airline. It’s the 1928 Real Aero Club of Andalucia’s poster for ‘Il Salon de Aeronautica…
A Year of Aviation Illustration & Art 