Vickers Aircraft Since 1908

This book is part of the Archive Photographs series, which uses old photographs and archived images to show the history of various local areas in Great Britain.

In depth descriptions and photographs of the aircraft of 21 nations presented with a unique human dimension that goes behind the machines to the people involved. Invaluable for specialists, accessible to enthusiasts, International Warbirds: An Illustrated Guide to World Military Aircraft, 1914–2000 puts the most legendary fighter aircraft of the 20th century developed outside the United States on vivid display. It offers 336 illustrated "biographies" of the most significant warplanes used in squadron service from World War I to the Balkan conflict, including numerous models from Great Britain, France, Russia, and Japan, as well as notable machines from Israel, Canada, China, India, Brazil, and other nations. Entries span the history and scope of military aircraft from bombers and fighters to transports, trainers, reconnaissance craft, sea planes, and helicopters, with each capsule history combining nuts-and-bolts technical data with the story of that model's evolution and use. Together, these portraits offer an exciting, well-researched tribute to visionary designers and builders as well as courageous pilots and crews across the globe, and tell a vivid tale of how air power became such a decisive factor in modern warfare.

From as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century, Britain was at the forefront of powered flight. Across the country many places became centres of innovation and experimentation, as increasing numbers of daring men took to the skies. It was in 1799, at Brompton Hall, that Sir George Cayley Bart put forward ideas which formed the basis of powered flight. Cayley is widely regarded as the father of aviation and his ancestral home the ‘cradle’ of British aviation. There were balloon flights at Hendon from 1862, although attempts at powered flights from the area later used as the famous airfield, do not seem to have been particularly successful. Despite this, Louis Bleriot established a flying school there in 1910. It was gliders that Percy Pilcher flew from the grounds of Stamford Hall, Leicestershire during the 1890s. He was killed in a crash there in 1899, but Pilcher had plans for a powered aircraft which experts believe may well have enabled him to beat the Wright Brothers in becoming the first to make a fixed-wing powered flight. At Brooklands attempts were made to build and fly a powered aircraft in 1906 even before the banked racetrack was completed but these were unsuccessful. But on 8 June 1908, A.V. Roe made what is considered to be the first powered flight in Britain from there – in reality a short hop – in a machine of his own design and construction, enabling Brooklands to claim to be the birthplace of British aviation. These are just a few of the many places investigated by Bruce Hales-Dutton in this intriguing look at the early days of British aviation, which includes the first ever aircraft factory in Britain in the railway arches at Battersea; Larkhill on Salisbury Plain which became the British Army’s first airfield, and Barking Creek where Frederick Handley Page established his first factory.

In his celebrated manifesto, "Aircraft" (1935), the architect Le Corbusier presented more than 100 photographs celebrating airplanes either in imperious flight or elegantly at rest. Dwelling on the artfully abstracted shapes of noses, wings, and tails, he declared : "Ponder a moment on the truth of these objects! Clearness of function!" In Aircraft, David Pascoe follows this lead and offers a startling new account of the form of the airplane, an object that, in the course of a hundred years, has developed from a flimsy contraption of wood, wire and canvas into a machine compounded of exotic materials whose wings can touch the edges of space. Tracing the airplane through the twentieth century, he considers the subject from a number of perspectives: as an inspiration for artists, architects and politicians; as a miracle of engineering; as a product of industrialized culture; as a device of military ambition; and, finally, in its clearness of function, as an instance of sublime technology. Profusely illustrated and authoritatively written, Aircraft offers not just a fresh account of aeronautical design, documenting, in particular, the forms of earlier flying machines and the dependence of later projects upon them, but also provides a cultural history of an object whose very shape contains the dreams and nightmares of the modern age.