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’…
Tag: Mythology
Rising Wind
Today a still from Hano Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises film. Loosely based on the biography of the designer of the Mitsubishi ‘Zero’ fighter, it’s an aeronautical design fest, even if very free with real history and some design. Other aspects are bang on, and some, such as the Caproni dream relationship feature often forgotten aircraft…
Airman! Bestride The World!
Following yesterday’s magazine advertisement, here we have the next ‘big sky, small world’ image, this time advertising how a career in the regular air force would allow you to bestride the world like a colossus. Generally the Aircraftsman Second Class was treated as the exact opposite, so a classic example of oversell, too! But there’s…
The World’s Your Westland
A magazine advertisement today, featuring a Westland Whirlwind helicopter. But more it’s a classic ‘big sky, small world’ image, one which comes up again and again as a trope, and we’ll see another tomorrow. Aeronautically, it’s a strong advert, pulling a ‘global’ reach globe together with the groundcrew man signalling the helicopter to come in…
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,…
Air France World 2
Today’s Poster follows yesterday’s. Designed by Lucien Boucher, it’s a 1949 poster advertising the ‘Orient – Extreme Orient’ destination with a orientalist design theme. A magnificent bird faces a Chinese style pagoda, with an Indian building behind it, all located over a map extending from India to China and the Oriental nations in between. Top…
It’s an Air France World
Today’s Poster. When an airline ‘owned’ the world. Today we are used to a diversity of airlines and cheaper carriers, so it’s easy to forget where each nation basically had one, national flag carrier. Here it’s Air France, by Lucien Boucher. As you’d expect, this brings not just their routes (almost an afterthought) but their…
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…
39 Model
Today’s Poster, a ‘special’ version from the 1939 New York World’s Fair. You may be surprised… It’s from a rather well known and popular film in the aviation niche, ‘The Rocketeer’. It makes a kind of sense from the film, but you really need to see the film to get it – go on, it’s…
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…
A Year of Aviation Illustration & Art 