Flightglobal

It’s taken us a while but as of yesterday the complete Flight International 100-year archive of scanned and OCR’d (searchable text) pdfs are up on Flightglobal.

Without meaning to blow our own trumpet this is a pretty impressive achievement.

There aren’t that mainly publishers that have been around for 100 years let alone scanned in their entire history and put it online for free. And I don’t just mean within the aviation industry but in the broader publishing world.

The technical aspects of the project also represent a significant achievement. 210,000 individual pages have been scanned in and subjected to Optical Character Recognition to ensure they are searchable. In addition, every page has been thumbnailed to aid the user when browsing. And the unique pdf viewer has been built pretty much from scratch.

All that remains now is the task of crawling the individual pages to extract meta data to ensure that search engines such as Google have the best idea of what each page contains.

I hope everyone is getting as much out of the archive as we are. There are some true gems in there, and as we go into 2008 we’ll be making much more of the pdfs throughout the site.

Flight’s coverage of the industry has changed and evolved over its 100-year history.

Today the pace of change is faster than it’s ever been, as the online medium opens doors to new formats and audiences hitherto inaccessible to a print product.

A good example of this is the coverage of the 1958 Munich Air Disaster which saw 23 people lose their lives when a BEA Elizabethan (G-ALZU) crashed on takeoff at Munich Airport on 6th February.

Looking back at the report in the Flight Archives, it’s interesting to note that the coverage of the crash was fairly low key despite the waves it was making in the wider media.

Unsurprisingly, for a publication that had positioned itself as a record of industry developments, emotion was kept out of the subsequent coverage, with the accident report, more than a year after the event, commanding more editorial space than the initial reaction.

Focus was on the aircraft itself and its safety record.

Today of course things are very different with user generated content, community platforms, blogs, image galleries and video all encouraging and allowing a more multi-media, emotive and in some cases speculative experience of any such event.

Here's a Flight cutaway of the Airspeed AS57 Ambassador (or Elizabethan as it was known while in BEA service in honour of the new Queen) ...

And for more thoughts and memories of the tragedy, Manchester United’s rich commemorative site is worth a visit …