Flight Archive Project

Welcome to the very first post on this blog which will chart the progress of our unique experiment to make our archives available online. Flight is lucky enough to have one of the very finest aviation archives in the world and it has long been a frustration that we have not been able to share this resource with a wider public.

Well, now, thanks to advances in technology and some dedicated work from our staff, we will be able to do just that.

Our efforts in archiving fall into three categories:

• The magazine
  
• The pictures
  
• The cutaways and technical drawings

Over the next few months we will be scanning some 200,000 pages of Flight and Flight International magazines back to the very first issue published way back in 1908. We will be using advanced OCR techniques to ensure that virtually every word can be searched online which will provide unparalleled access for the very first time. To give you an idea of what to expect take a look at some specimen pages from 1910, here and here. We hope our final technical solution will be more elegant and the interface much more usable, but you get the idea.

Over the years we have amassed an estimated one million pictures - many on glass plates - currently stored in our head office in Sutton, Surrey in the UK. A team in our offices in Rugby led by  Steve Butler, Martin Smith and Keith Blincow have been carefully scanning and touching up a selection of these images and we now have over 1,000 on the web, from the pre-1914 era, from the 1930's - civil and military, from the second world war and from the immediate post-war era. The team have also selected some pictures linked by themes and the first - air races - are now available.

Finally Joe Picarella, Flight's Senior Technical Artist, is painstakingly scanning the vast library of techical drawings and cutaways published over the past 100 years in Flight, Flight Itnernational and The Aeroplane. As Joe says in his introduction page: "This collection will ultimately represent 75% of the world's aerospace cutaway images."

The Archive Project is very much a work in progress and we will be charting our progress here. We are very much interesting in your views and suggestions so please use the comment links on our posts to provide some feedback.

In order to make it in time for Farnborough we rushed through the gallery software for our picture archive. Modifications and improvements are on the way starting, hopefully, tomorrow. We're improving the navigation and adding tags so the search engines will hopefully pick us up. We know we haven't got captions yet; we're working on that, too.

Let us know if there are things you can think of that we should do to improve things.

Hello world and welcome to the first of my cutaway blogs! As you may have already seen we have just launched the cutaway section of the Flightglobal.com archives project, if you have not seen it, then please feel free to visit at:

Cutaways

This cutaway section will slowly grow over the coming months to include almost all of the cutaways produced by Flight International, allow you to search the database for specific cutaways and to possible purchase them for either private use (screen savers or prints), right through to industrial, marketing and publishing purposes.

This is a mammoth undertaking for the department and one that has been on the cards for some time, but we have finally got there despite the heavy Farnborough workload during the first half of 2006. This month alone we will publish four cutaways over the RIAT and Farnborough airshows, a record-breaking run for Flight, with the 4th July Global Hawk, 11th July Boeing KC-767A, 18th July Embraer 195 and 25th July Bell Boeing MV-22B!

These Blogs will hopefully keep you informed of Flight's cutaway schedule, allow you to meet my team and also let you peak into the world of the Flight cutaway. We have many interesting cutaways and related projects in the pipeline at the moment, including at least three more planned for the later half of the year, including the Gulfstream G150 and Cessna Mustang for the NBAA show.

Attached is a photo of me on my visit to Cessna's Independence facility in April to inspect the Mustang (3rd prototype) for the planned cutaway in October.

In the meantime, we will continue to add to and perfect the cutaway site and hopefully answer some of your question.

We have just released an update version of the picture archive and cutaways gallery pages. If you click on the "Image Archive" logo on the right hand side you will now be taken back to the main page. Click on the "Flight" logo on the left and you will be taken back to the home page of Flight Global. We also now have captions on many of the pictures (take a look at this example). There will be more enhancements over the coming days and weeks, and, of course, more content. So please keep coming back, and do let us have any suggestions.  

Good news - the experimental and prototype picture collection is now live here. Let us know what you think of the pictures.

Hi, and welcome to the Flight Archive. I thought I would share with you some of the thoughts that have passed through the 'old grey cells' whilst working with the images of the Flight archive.

On the first occasion of visiting the archive, I knew I had to look up as a personal priority, a specific series of images that I knew had been published in various books and credited to Flight. This was a set of photos taken at Duxford of 601 Squadron Bell P-39 Airacobras.

I used the in-house catalogue and was soon reaching for the box holding the images. Opening the box, I found the glass plates wrapped in translucent sleeves and then, wearing cotton gloves I gently removed the glass plate and there it was, the original image of the line up of Airacobras. Many more images were found than I had previously seen. It was then I realised the value of what was held here. The published photographs were merely the 'tip of the iceberg'. It was obvious really, only the best pictures for the purpose of the article would be published, and that was after any military censorship. Many more images showed invaluable detail that at the time seemed mundane or not dramatic, but they yielded detail to me I had only dreamt of. 

As a long term project, I have been researching a local airfield to my home, RAF Lichfield, in Staffordshire. Two of the based units were 51 and 82 MU (Maintenance Unit), and they handled RAF Airacobras after their short service life. Various leads from books and magazine articles gave me tantalising leads and through my own research at the National Archive at Kew, using the units Operational Record Book (ORB) and pilots logs, I started to get a picture of Lichfield's part of this 'Lend - Lease' aircraft's short service career.

The published photos had been well 'pawed over' by me when researching this type in RAF service, their service histories, codes and names carried and eventual fate. With only four aircraft modified for operational service, 601 Squadron flew only four missions in three days in October 1941, amounting to a total of nine sorties. Their sole impact being shooting up a few barges across the Channel. Yet, here we were being told in these very images that these 'numerous' aircraft were an extremely potent weapon. The official reason for the withdrawal of the type in December 1941 was given as difficulties with the compass, armament and an extremely high unserviceability rate.

I hope that through the thousands of images we can bring to you, together with details giving specific information like date, location, personalities names etc. from the original entry in the Image Catalogue, then even more information can be forthcoming via this open forum. The captions from the magazine at the time of publication could never portray the significance that an aircraft or personality went on to accomplish, or for that matter, how they failed to live up to the expectations expressed at the time of print. With your help, this forum could help put a balanced appreciation of the subjects recorded in images held in the Flight Archive.

It's sometimes difficult to know how any enhancements we make to the website will go down with readers or users. So it was nice today, when the editor of Flight International , Murdo Morrison, received the following email:

Dear Mr. Morrison,

I want to thank you for putting Flight's collection of photos, cutaways and other material online.  It is a fine service to aviation in all its guises from the most serious professionals to casual enthusiasts.  I subscribed to Both Flight and Av Week for most of my professional career and had occasion to contact your photo archivist, I believe I recall her name was Anne Tilbury, some time in the sixties.  She was most helpful to me in finding a photo I needed for a presentation I was doing for Boeing.

Thank you again good sir and kudos to the whole Flight staff.

Cheers, 

Jim Schubert
Seattle

Well, Farnborough has once again come and gone and just like Christmas, you wait all year for it to arrive and then it's over in a couple of days. While it already seems like a distant memory or something I watched on TV, the show was a classic one, with the UK flying debuts for the Airbus 380, Bell Boeing MV-22B and static debut for the Sino Swearingen SJ30-2, all of which we have produced cutaways for over the last 12 months.

As mentioned, the work up to our record breaking four colour cutaways in Flight International over the show has been a difficult task, especially coupled with the launch of the cutaways archive. Despite this 4th July issue carried the Northrop Grumman Global Hawk Block 20 cutaway, 11th July carried the Boeing KC-767A, 18th July carried the Embraer 195 and 25th July carried the Bell Boeing MV-22B Block B. All of which can now be seen on the "Posters" section of the cutaway archive, take a look.

As part of our typical marketing and PR agreement with the manufacturers, we offer the added bonus of having the cutaway artists at the show to sign cutaway poster at their stands, chalets and static aircraft. This has always been a good PR exercise and a real crowd puller as it offers both the general public and company guests the chance to get a personalised gift to remember the airshow. This Farnborough was no exception and I ended up doing 3 signings sessions and one corporate hand-over for the show daily.

On the Tuesday Murdo Morrison (the Editor of Flight international), together with Robert Hancock (Vice-president North and South America sales) and myself handed over a framed and signed poster to the President of Embraer, Mauricio Botelho (centre). See page 2 of the Flight Daily News. These corporate presentations are always fun to do as you know that the cutaways will end up hanging in important offices or front-office locations at company headquarters, which certainly helps with Flight branding.

Also on the Tuesday I was signing cutaways for guests and dignitaries at the Bell Boeing chalet (due to the 38C heat) and met the USMC officer in charge of the entire project. Over the hour and half sitting I personalised around 50 posters for the program and engineering teams. It's always a pleasure to hear "I have your earlier cutaway in my office and use it all the time" or "I make these parts on the aircraft, its nice to see you got it in."

 On Wednesday, because of the heat again, I signed for a similar time in the Northrop Grumman centre, boy was I glad of the air conditioning! Once again it was a pleasure to do the signings, as all of the PR representatives guided their guests and customers through my position.

 On Thursday the temperature had dropped and I finally got to sign alongside the MV-22B on the static park. This was a great hour and with a little encouragement the two attending VMX-22 (Operations and Test Evaluation Squadron) Marine pilots were roped in to signing posters as well! The crowds grew quickly and at one point a queue formed, how British!

The show was also the point at which we (the Flightglobal editorial and ad team) narrowed down our shortlist of cutaways for 2007-2008. Several are already locked into place, but the others will be solidified over the next few weeks. For me attending the shows allows me to meet face to face with the right people at the chosen companies and start the cutaway process moving along.

Sometimes this process may take 18 months to come to fruition and for others it is like visiting old friends or family.

The show also allows me to look for unlicensed use of the cutaways, of which there were three cases at this show. These will be followed up in due course!

I will report on our planned list in another blog.

Click here to see the cutaway page.