WD765 Farnborough 1957

Vintage canvas? hangar there in the ETPS area…a Brownie 127 photo 🙂

Early Kodachrome

Reading the history of Kodachrome online, it seems the 5×4 sheet film version was only ASA 8 or 10 which I think equates to about 1/60 or 1/125 at f/5.6 in sunshine…. at least the aircraft props would look nice and blurred :)….as well as camera shake problems , depth of field would have been tricky with 5×4 cameras (as exemplified in Charles E Browns R.N. Avenger pic I think)

WB271 on Heathrow 1973

This was on the business ramp, Heathrow South in 1973 when I wandered over to the Pan Am Maintenance Canteen …it was celebrating the delivery of the first production Firefly from Fairey’s Great West Aerodrome (Heathrow) 30 years earlier

http://www.abpic.co.uk/photo/1005300/

Early Kodachrome….History’s tricky stuff

In the preface to ‘The Royal Air Force of World War Two’ by Roger Freeman 1993 it says that Bill Ziff of Flying magazine sent over 100 sheets of 5×4 Kodachrome in Nov 1941 for the magazines RAF issue(out Sep 1942), one exposed set of 31 shots being sent to Flying in May 1942 along with another 31 to the British Information Service in Washington….mostly by Charles E Brown.The preface also says that Brown had been using 35mm Kodachrome in his Zeiss Contax on RAF fields sparingly since early 1941 although he shot a whole role on Stirlings at Waterbeach in 1942…. I think he would have taken both cameras on such important official assignments….Mick (Worth noting those Walrus/Pisa pics come up large if you open them into a new window)

Charles E Brown early colour

Adrian:
Fantastic quality…what is also amazing is that finding out that 4×5 Kodachrome was available in WW2!

Charle E. Brown, the great British aviation photographer managed to get Kodachrome in the war but only 35mm I believe. Certainly his colour shots from WW2 in the first ‘Camera Above the Clouds’ book don’t have the resolution that those pics have.

Postfade….I checked in the preface to the all-colour Vol III of Camera above the Clouds and indeed Charles E Brown shot his first colour aviation shots (of the RAF) in 1942 with a 35mm Zeiss Contax loaded with Kodachrome supplied by the U.S. Flying magazine for their RAF issue of September 1942 ….Brown had other links with the Americans later in the war but the preface merely mentions that after the war colour sheet film which would fit Brown’s trusty Zeiss Palmos camera became more readily available.

WWII Colour photos Shorpy’s site

A lot of these are Library of Congress photos which you can access online in the raw scanned state. I think Charles E Brown may have had 4×5 Kodachrome too, I’ll check. Shorpy’s pics look as if they’ve been sharpened very professionally in photoshop
The Library of Congress also contains the b&w Matson collection which was mainly shot in Palestine from 1900 to 1945…. I’ve sifted through the aviation photos and edited a couple of albums on Flickr in ‘sets’ lower down

http://www.flickr.com/photos/74784995@N00/sets/

Escorting Connies on Three

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There was a point raised about escorting Connies on three over the Atlantic. With the introduction of the Constellation ‘G’ model, the airlines found out that it could cruise safely and more economically on three – so they would feather one and under international law, advise the control areas. The Control Centres on the UK side had a requirement to scramble the SAR Shack if any a/c lost an engine. After some time it was changed so that we were woke up as the a/c passed mid-Atlantic and collected in the Ops Room to watch the odd counter on the plot as it reported in every 30 mins.

I’ve never heard of airlines deliberately shutting down engines for economy reasons over the Atlantic before….are you sure about this…..there would have been plenty of opportunities for escorting unpremeditated shutdowns on propliners….longshot