Seasons Greetings this is British aviation pioneer F. Warren Merriam at Brooklands, England, on November 23rd 1912 this is the earliest photographic evidence of Father Christmas in a flying machine that I am aware of. If you know of anything else,...

Seasons Greetings

this is British aviation pioneer F. Warren Merriam at Brooklands, England, on November 23rd 1912

this is the earliest photographic evidence of Father Christmas in a flying machine that I am aware of. If you know of anything else, please let me know!

photo via the Aviation Historian archives, with great thanks. the magazine has been serialising “Echoes From Dawn Skies”, Merriam’s long-lost manuscript of memories from his contemporaries. great stuff.

Apparently I have posted only eight times in the last year. This is due to a new addition to the family, who is now too big for his skeleton suit. All I have for you at the moment is this: the spooky tag (above image: ““Farman 40 of pilot Lt....

Apparently I have posted only eight times in the last year. This is due to a new addition to the family, who is now too big for his skeleton suit.

All I have for you at the moment is this: the spooky tag

(above image: ““Farman 40 of pilot Lt. Jaumotte and observer sLt. Wouters”, from a website/source that no longer exists!)

Hope to be "back” soon.

“Everyone knows that Neil Armstrong, who died on 25 August 2012 aged 82, was the first man to step on the moon. What is probably less well known is that in 1971 he visited the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Bedford, at that time the UK’s premier...
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“Everyone knows that Neil Armstrong, who died on 25 August 2012 aged 82, was the first man to step on the moon. What is probably less well known is that in 1971 he visited the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Bedford, at that time the UK’s premier...
ZoomInfo

“Everyone knows that Neil Armstrong, who died on 25 August 2012 aged 82, was the first man to step on the moon. What is probably less well known is that in 1971 he visited the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Bedford, at that time the UK’s premier flight testing and wind tunnel research centre, while on a goodwill visit to Britain.

The Establishment at Thurleigh was conducting experimental flying and other research as part of the Concorde development programme. As an experienced test pilot, Armstrong readily accepted the invitation to fly something unusual, one of RAE’s unique research aircraft, the Handley Page HP115. This was used to investigate the low-speed flying qualities of highly-swept “slender delta” wings suitable for Concorde…

The HP115’s first flight took place at Thurleigh on 17 Aug 1961..8 years before Concorde, which had its first flight in the same year, 1969, as Armstrong landed on the moon.

As his introduction to flying the single-seat HP115 aircraft at Bedford on 24 June 1971, Armstrong was briefed by RAE test pilot Ron Ledwidge (who died in 2003) and then, in effect, was handed the keys and
told to go. That’s what test pilots do. He came back safely, all smiles after a brief flight. The HP115 is now at the Fleet Air Arm Museum, Yeovilton” (via)

we left things back in October with this image, which I found in an old post on Scott Lowther’s “The Unwanted Blog” a bit of hunting lead to me finding and purchasing a book entitled “Aerostatische Flugkörper, schwerer als Luft” (“Aerostatic...

we left things back in October with this image, which I found in an old post on Scott Lowther’s “The Unwanted Blog”

a bit of hunting lead to me finding and purchasing a book entitled “Aerostatische Flugkörper, schwerer als Luft” (“Aerostatic missiles, heavier than air”) by Bernhard de Temple - a German professor who worked on a number of academic, professional and personal aerostatic projects between about 1982 to 2005 - and who died in April of this year.

There are several outlandish and grand designs among his work, and I ’ll be posting a number of these over the next few days.