Flying Logbooks Should NEVER Be Destroyed.

Flipping the coin-if you have a logbook,medals, pathfinder certificate-and no family line to pass on to,What does one do. Pass to a museum who sells on duplicates or puts them in a box in the ‘archives’ lost forever. It may contain little of general interest, but have great setimental value.
I have made pdf of items and put onto website with airmans history-the best I can do at the present.
Paul H.

I would think to 99.9% of the population it’s just another book and will get thrown out with the rest of the junk.

Totally with you there Gsa,I pulled alot of paperwork/photos out of a skip recently ,which belonged medic who was one of the first to enter Belsen..harrowing stuff… but history all the same.

People should take their memories with them, without life catalogued in clinical fashion. What a dull world it would be if one could just turn to the ‘the autobiography of so-and-so’, find out everything one wanted to, and then put the book away. A great deal of the fun and interest in any subject is the serendipitous. Vicarious pleasure should be strictly limited.

I have yet to read an autobiography where I felt it was someone’s life ‘catalogued in clinical fashion’ Infact its the unclinical human element of them that I think make them so enjoyable, unlike many historian scribed books devoted to a specific aircraft type/squadron/airfield, or whatever. Now, they can be very clinical!

Of course, if you like to aquire your knowledge in a ‘serenipitous’ manner, you are free to choose not to read any books you think will spoil your fun; but it’s not a good reason to deny them to the rest of us.

Thanks for that succinct and informative reply. I do worry about the future of images..in the absence of old shoeboxes filled with curling monochrome prints in them. Will we have pictorial memories of our times in the future, I wonder.

There is a question mark to the durability of digital records, which an IT ‘Geek’ has to answer.

I’ll own up to that description.

There are actually two questions to answer here. Firstly, the physical durability of the records. A pattern of ones and zeros which can be faultlessly copied ad infinitim is theoretically ‘immortal’. The trick is to make sure both that the copies are made faultlessly (this will be done behind the scenes by the operating system and/or file transfer protocol you use, so no worries there) and that you do the copies in plenty of time before the storage media used deteriorates to the point where errors are inevitable.

What format to use? Despite some scare stories in the early years, and some too-well-publicised problems with what usually turned out to be faulty production, CDs and DVDs are very robust and might be expected to last a century or more. Some people will tell you they’ll go on forever; some say they’ll be unreadable in 20 years. I suspect many of us have music CD which are 20 years old and more – recordable data CDs/DVDs probably aren’t as robust (otherwise you wouldn’t be able to record on them at a price any of us would fancy), but they are pretty durable. I remember a demonstration by one of the manufacturers in the 1980s where, to prove how good CDs were at protecting data, they sandpapered one, then spread raspberry jam on it, and still managed to read the files that were stored on it (what the jam did to the CD drive wasn’t recorded, IIRC).

If you want your storage online all the time, then you’re probably talking about a more traditional ‘hard disk’. These days such disks, in any sort of ‘production’ environment, will most likely be in what are called redundant arrays (RAID), where a file is stored in parts across a number of disks, with enough information on each disk that if any single disk fails the complete contents of the array can be recreated from the information held on the others. This is a bit of a scary process, even for the professionals, but it does work (generally very well). If you have your disks running all the time, and in the kind of ideal conditions you might expect in a proper data centre, the disks will last for a good many years – certainly well past any manufacturer’s guarantee – but they have fast-moving parts and very fine tolerances so things will wear out eventually. Maybe ten or a dozen years is a sensible life to assume, although I do know of disks in use in a corporate environment for more than twice that length of time.

Solid-state storage is a practical alternative – indeed this is the basis of the USB sticks or ‘thumb drives’ we all know – and the advantages of no moving parts are obvious. However, compared to ‘traditional’ disks, solid state storage is still ridiculously expensive for a sizable storage volume. The most common variety, known as ‘flash memory’, also has a theoretical limit of around half-a-million writes to any single memory location, after which it is likely to be unusable. Half-a-million seems a huge amount, but once you start to look into the amount of ‘housekeeping’ most operating systems perform – moving stuff around to improve performance – it isn’t such a big number (less of this is necessary in solid state memory compared to rotating disks, but it does still go on). The practical effect here is that the amount of storage available on a solid state chip degrades with time, although the data stored there should be safe right up to the point where you can’t read any of it…

The second question is how you store and retrieve the data. Even if you assume we have the physical media question answered satisfactorily (and the two are not inseparable) we still have to be able to read the stored data at some unspecified point in the future. JPEGs, TIFFs and PDFs might look all-pervasive now, but file formats change and manufacturers don’t always see the need to make things completely ‘backwards compatible’. If you want examples, look no further than the very early versions of PDFs and Microsoft Word documents, both of which are almost unrecognisable from what is created today. Once the programs which can create a file format are no longer compatible with the hardware anyone is likely to have in use to run them on there is precious little commercial pressure for the software manufactures to continue support for that format, even if it’s earlier a version of something current, and eventually it will be unreadable. If the way the file is encoded is in the public domain – and thankfully these days most are – then it is not beyond the wit of man to write a program to retrieve an archaic file format, but you have to have the will and the information to do that, and it doesn’t come free…

The way round that problem is to make sure that as a particular file format becomes generally ‘unsupported’, you copy the stored information to a more modern format. This copying is the one area where you have to be careful about losing information. It is perhaps most worrying in terms of image files, but the concerns apply across the board. Even saving a JPEG into the same format can result in data loss, as different assumptions are made each time about how to encode the data. Convert from one to another – particularly where there were commercial ‘differences’ between the originators – and you’re asking for trouble. You might not notice over a few iterations of this process, but it’s not something you can do for ever. Some formats are called ‘lossless’ (TIFF is one such) as they preserve all the data in the original, but this leads to a much larger file, but even if the old format includes everything and you’re converting to another lossless format I wouldn’t want to provide a cast-iron guarantee that everything will be preserved – you’d hope it would, but an absolute guarantee for every occasion? No chance. This is one area which I imagine the software industry, and particularly the more enthusiastic ‘open source’ elements, will solve sometime in the not too distant future, but we haven’t got there yet.

People should take their memories with them, without life catalogued in clinical fashion. What a dull world it would be if one could just turn to the ‘the autobiography of so-and-so’, find out everything one wanted to, and then put the book away. A great deal of the fun and interest in any subject is the serendipitous. Vicarious pleasure should be strictly limited.

On a similar note I am sadened by the number of notable people in aviation who have died and taken all their memories with them. I would have loved to have been able to read the autobiographies of Ray Hanna, Viv Bellemy, Dicky Martin, Bill Bowker, Doug Arnold, Ron Payne ect. ect. ect.

The prospect of preserving hard copies of any logbook deemed interesting still presents a prohibitively expensive and labour intensive task.
Perhaps the major museums (Worldwide) need to compile a wish list, past, present and maybe maintained for the future.
There then remains the question of what to do about the massive number of logbooks that record exemplary careers. Maybe they could be retained in pdf form. Companies do it all the time, its expensive, but can be done by competent enthusiasts (there are more of them about than you might think).
There is a question mark to the durability of digital records, which an IT ‘Geek’ has to answer.
Perhaps a label needs to be created, to be stuck into all logbooks, explaining their value as historical records, and the possibility that they may have a financial value.
If they were only elevated to the same level as medals, something would have been achieved.

Kick that one around chaps, if it only saves one gem, or persuades one possessive owner hoarder to provide affordable access, it will be worth it.

Hendon has copies of my logbooks up to circa 2005; why? fewer and fewer current aircrew even think that Hendon would be interested. My logbooks were to my eyes unremarkable but to Hendon they covered NI, Bosnia, Kosovo and Gulf 2 – they had very few on file. Whilst they were copying mine they brought out a number of artifacts, including a Bader logbook. They produced one gem of information with a flourish – Micky Martin had stayed in the RAF post war rising to (IIRC) AVM. When SASO or AOC 38 Gp at Upavon he checked out in the Wessex at Odiham – the staff took great pleasure in telling me that as a student pilot I’d signed for the same ac as captain as a Dambuster….The power of logbooks….

The facility in which the logbooks were stored was the MoD Document Repository at Hayes. I know of individuals who were granted unique access to what was termed “the cage” – literally a cage in a large room in which certain documents were made available. Outside of the cage were shelves of said logbooks. On one occasion one individual made a note to look more closely at the logbooks on his next visit which was due to be the following week.

The following week work inevitibly got in the way.

When he finally returned the week afterwards he was horrified to find the shelves bare. When asked where the logbooks had gone, he was told that they had had a clear-out. “Oh, we were expecting you to have been here last week”, he was told.

When asked where they had gone, he was told that they had been bagged up and dumped outside to await collection to be destroyed. When he asked if he could delve into some of the bags to ascertain whether there were any specific logbooks of interest his request was politely but firmly declined on the grounds that it would make a mess.

The logbooks went.

Logbooks are, technically, still Crown property. At the end of an individual’s service he/she is supposed to hand them back. Of course this never happens in reality.

However, one time it does tend to happen – certainly in the past – is when that individual dies in service. The personal effects would be returned to the family but such a Crown document would have been returned to the system for storage.

It is our firm belief that on those shelves of logbooks were, amongst others, those of one Lieutenant Commander Eugene Esmonde who, of course, won the VC for his part in leading the attack on Scharnhorst and Gneisenau during the ‘Channel Dash’ in February 1942. He was killed during the attack and his logbook has never surfaced. Presumably it was returned into the system and ended up at Hayes, never being claimed by his relatives.

It is a shameful episode in history that such documentation was willfully destroyed without a proper understanding of its value to future generations. Sadly, it’s not something consigned to the past; logbooks still slip through fingers even today. House clearances, the perceived financial value of the items and the subsequent constant threat of going to the highest bidder on eBay means that the national museums and major collections are often denied the opportunity to either take custody of originals or at the very least a photocopy.

The Fleet Air Arm Museum has a substantial collection of both original and photocopied logbooks in their archive and they always welcome new additions or loans for copying.

Indeed many years ago Peter Twiss had indicated that his logbooks would be forwarded to Yeovilton in the fullness of time. On that basis we waited patiently. Sadly, of course, they now seem to have disappeared into someone’s private collection which has robbed those of us seeking to record aviation history the opportunity to fill in significant gaps in coverage. I sincerely hope that whoever secured their purchase will ultimately allow the Museum to at least take a photocopy to ensure that a duplicate record can be kept in perpetuity.

From the RAF Museum’s website –

We are often asked whether we hold a specific person’s log book. When aircrew were reported missing their effects were collected together and held in a central depository. Whilst in most cases their property was later handed over to next of kin, unclaimed logbooks were retained by the Air Ministry. By 1959, these unclaimed logbooks covered some 6500 feet of shelving. It was decided that representative samples would be preserved in the Public Record Office and the remainder destroyed at the end of 1960. This decision was announced in the Press and a number of people claimed logbooks. But the vast majority were destroyed, ironically just a few years before the RAF Museum was founded.

http://http://www.rafmuseum.org.uk/research/default/archive-collection/aircrew-logbooks.aspx

The comments on the ownership of logbooks stirred me to look at my own.
My own new career was almost entirely devoted to flight testing for an aircraft company,
The company required us to keep a log, there was however no company document covering this and we all used service logbooks scrounged by the Chief Test Pilots office from various sources.
I have three:
1) RCAF Form R65
2) RAF Form 414
3) ROYAL NAVY form S 1175
All of the above are official forms and follow the familiar pattern, more important is the statement;
This book is an official document and is the property of His/Her Majesty’s Government.
So, all service Aircrew logbooks filled in according to regulations as part of one’s duty, must be long to HMG.
In my own case as aircrew employed in industry, the books are not Official documents, and I can probably claim to be the custodian.
Private Pilots are obliged by the CAA to keep a logbook, but I think the ownership remains with the individual.
I am sure the CAA has a system for commercial aircrew.

Oh what a tangled web we weave!

All this means that as far as officialdom is concerned, the records of service aircrew can be controlled and if necessary withheld. Where they double as historical documents the museum’s are probably doing a fine job, although one or two (you know who they are) do regard them as a source of revenue, sometimes excessive.

The two logbooks I have quoted i.e. Penrose and Gellatly, fall into the industrial aircrew category.
I do know that ‘Hal’ Penrose was not a meticulous logkeeper and that nothing ever surfaced after he died.

I think we have come to my purpose for this thread. One or two famous logbooks have appeared on the BBC ‘Antiques Roadshow’ and very high prices have been quoted. If the collectors world can do more to make people realise that aircrew logbooks are historical evidence, as yet untouched by computers, and frequently found to be valuable, we will have struck a blow for history.

Sorry about the ear bashing, but I think it is all relevant.

It is not just ex aircrew and families that are guilty of destroying history. Back in the day when the Ministry of Civil Aviation ran most of the UK’s civil airports they would destroy all the airport movements books every 5 years or when a airport closed. This was thankfully brought to a halt in the late 50’s. So sadly no official information is available on early post war civil movements.
Thankfully the RAF were not so destructive with their squadron and station ORB’s. Although it must be said their usefulness depends on the enthusiasm, or lack of, the compiler.

I remember reading somehwere that many of the Log Books were destroyed by Kew, because they had so many.
Ian

When we obtained XG743 we where told at the time that no documentation existed. but by trawling through the catelogues of archive material held and with the assistance of staff at a different museum we now have ALL the form 700’s and maintenance logs not only for the airframe but the ejector seats as well.

It is surprising what is still lurking out there in storage in national collections and their archives not surprising they dont have a clue of the top of the bat what they do hold.

So never say never just get yourself a comfortable seat a good internet connection a decent phone manner and a cuppa and get stuck in.

Also the reward of a couple of boxes of a decent quality biscuit usually elicits a very positive attitude to your quest :D:D:D:D

As regards
Log books we have been fortunate in that an appeal on our web site has brought response form two pilots who flew the aircraft in service who have very generously donated copies of their log books to us.

As regards personal log books such as Harold Penrose and others that have recently gone under the hammer at auction it is at the ned of the day up to the family to decide what happens to it.In some cases sadly log books and even medals have been lost by the simple matter relatives or others clearing possessions of a deceased see no value in them and they get skipped.It would be nice if all such log books could be held centrally of copies of them but who would collate such a thing and where would they be held ?. If it was done digitally then it would still take a lot of effort and staff and money to operate and maintain.

Mike E

www.aircraftrestorationgroup.org

Well the MOD are not having mine:D:D
Seriously, Hendon have a large collection of logbooks and they can be donated to them I believe.

If the log books were issued by the MOD and filled in as part of the pilots duties then don’t they still belong to the MOD.

In cases I know of, when an old person (having lots of stuff) has died,a lot of photographs, letters, books etc just gets thrown out. The family have got enough to worry about without becoming a sort of museum trust. Interesting stuff is lost, yes, but specific items are not going to get miraculously preserved.
I think it is up to the individual, while still alive, to recognise the value where appropriate and take action to preserve the item. Let that be a bit of advice to you all! It might not be that easy. I have offerred items to what seemed appropriate collections before now and they just don’t want to know.

I wonder if sometimes, when someone is killed in flying, that the rest of the family don’t want any reminder or evidence left of the flying activities?

Also worth noting that ‘lost forever’ could be accidental through moving or flood etc, or even squirelled away in an unkown collection, though I don’t know in Davids’ cases above.

David, have you ever come across Gordon Slades’ logbooks?

What about the next of kin?

There was dismay from some quarters when the late Peter Twiss’ log books etc went up for auction, and i think went to a private collector. But at least his family didnt destroy them !!

Rob