Post your "1934 Air-race" pics here!

There are loads of great pics of all the aeroplanes in the race at this site..

http://www.territorystories.nt.gov.au/handle/10070/16/browse?value=Richards%2C+A.+%26+B.&type=author

Ken

The Tom Campbell Balck site is just brilliant, amazed at the details that have been researched.

Planemike

there is a great site dedicated to Tom Campbell Black which has lots of great pics here… http://www.tomcampbellblack.150m.com/

Ken
www.kenfern.co.uk (new web site, have a look please )

1934 race

Flight Global have some pages in their air races section …got bored trying to make the link work!

Hi David

That Rapide pic came my way as part of my ongoing collection of DH multis. I have no idea as to it’s history, other than it appears to be contemporary. As to scanning historical images – that’s a an ongoing task we have. We have ‘saved’ stuff from car-boot sales, dustbins, dumpsters and even once from a garden incinerator about 5 minutes before the guy’s wife lit the match!(he had not long passed away, and she was ‘clearing out’).

Currently here we run a pair of 5 Terrabyte hard-drives with auto back-up,but as we scan everything at a minimum of 600 dpi, that’s not going to last long. Unfortunately no-one knows the long term implications or lifespan of e-storage. We have a policy of ‘rolling over’ and re-activating our CD library every five years.

A few years ago myself and David Lee of BAPC organised ‘G-DASH’, a one-day conference at Cosford for discussing preserving the civil side of things, and electronic image storage played a part of the discussions. Lots of well-intentioned high-and-mighty talk occurred, but unfortunately the twin-terrors of ‘Copyright’ and ‘Reprographic’ rights raised their heads and that frightened everyone off. In the end nothing really long-term came from the G-DASH conference, because more seem interested in preserving military than civil.

We at GMS Enterprises would love to see more of a ‘Historic Image Library’ created somehow, but the cost would be high and legal implications difficult to overcome. And that is without attempting to tackle the collector mentality of ‘I’ve got, you’re not having’! Yes, we collect, but we also use and we also try and share where we can – as shown by the pics we post in this forum. We do try and trace copyright owners, but often that is not possible, (indeed, we are trying to sort out one example as I write this) so in all our publications we print this:

The author and publisher are indebted to many people and organisations for providing photographs for this history, but in some cases it has not been possible to identify the original photographer and so credits are given in the appropriate places to the immediate supplier. If any of the pictures have not been correctly credited, the author and publisher apologise.

Graham,

In the 30’s my father was an observer/air gunner with 36 Sqdn flying Hawker Horsleys from Seletar. He had a great collection of pics of the McRobertson Air race aircraft, that I used to ‘pore over’ as a boy.
The Comets and the KLM DC2 were shown along with others.
Sometime in the 70’s he gave his collection to the RAF Museum at Hendon.
I’d love to see them again but I understand the the museum has thousands of pictures that are still uncatalogued!

A bit ‘off thread’…but I also remember one memorable sequence of three pics taken from the accompanying launch as his Horsley practiced torpedoing a large ‘rock’ in the Singapore Straits. First pic shows the torpedo just leaving the plane. It had a ‘datum line’ drawn on the picture to calculate the dropping angle. The second picture has the Horsley ‘water ski-ing’ (it had wheels). The plane had to go into a shallow dive to get the torpedo entry correct…but the plane was not meant to touch the water though!
Last pic shows a planes tail sticking up out of the water and two crew members swimming to the launch. The sequence always made me laugh.

It’s a pity that a campaign to scan historical images can’t be organised as I’m sure they are being ‘thrown away in old shoe boxes’ virtually daily.

David Taylor.

Three more Bellanca ‘The Irish Swoop’ this din not race in the end.
DH Puss Moth flown by Melrose and the Gee Bee QED flown by Jacqueline Cocchran.

Dave

Not the best of images, but taken from a tiny 620 contact print is this view of DH89 Rapide ZK-ACO (Race Number ’60’) during the Singapore refueling stop. The aircraft was entered by the New Zealand Centenary Committee. I just love the clothes!