In recognition of the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) History & Heritage Symposium this week, let’s take a look at two aspects of the RAAF roundel. Originally the RAAF’s roundel design was based on the British Royal Air Force’s, itself a derivative of the French air arm’s roundel, featuring red white and blue. The red…
Tag: Marine aircraft
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…
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…
3,000 km Across the Atlantic
Today’s Poster. Commemorating Italo Balbo’s 1930 flight of twelve Savoia-Marchetti S.55 flying boats from Orbetello Airfield, Italy to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil between 17 December 1930 and 15 January 1931. The poster is listed as from 1931 – I.G.A.P. Roma, 98 cm x 140 cm, artist : Umberto Di Lazzaro. This is where the term…
Triangle Tribulations
Today’s Poster from the Facebook Vault of the Atomic Space Age, here. It’s a great claim by Convair, but in the end it wasn’t a great result. The exciting F2Y Sea Dart (a very unusual marine jet aircraft that hydroplaned on skis) proved an abortive concept though they managed to fly prototypes (XF2Y-1) which survive…
Posters Everywhere
Today’s Posters surprised me! Doing a project like this can start one seeing the subject pop up in all kinds of places, in a ‘seeing patterns’ kind of way, but this just leapt off the screen at me. It’s perhaps worrying that I’m so current in the topic that can point to the origin of…
Crash Pastoral
Today’s Poster has a remarkably placid feel, despite depicting the aftermath of a floatplane ditching. Entitled ‘Warning! Consider the possible consequences if you are careless in your work’, it is a 1917 painting by L.N. Britton, reproduced as a 104 x 72 cm poster and shows a pair of US Navy floatplanes, one of the…
A Year of Aviation Illustration & Art 