History of British Aviation, 1908-1914 PDF Download

Author: R. Dallas Brett
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Aeronautics
Languages : en
Pages : 388

View

Book Description

Author: R. Dallas Brett
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 526

View

Book Description

Author: Alexander Howlett
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000387615
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

View

Book Description
The Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) revolutionized warfare at sea, on land, and in the air. This little-known naval aviation organization introduced and operationalized aircraft carrier strike, aerial anti-submarine warfare, strategic bombing, and the air defence of the British Isles more than 20 years before the outbreak of the Second World War. Traditionally marginalized in a literature dominated by the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Air Force, the RNAS and its innovative practitioners, nevertheless, shaped the fundamentals of air power and contributed significantly to the Allied victory in the First World War. The Development of British Naval Aviation utilizes archival documents and newly published research to resurrect the legacy of the RNAS and demonstrate its central role in Britain’s war effort.

Author: Bruce Hales-Dutton
Publisher: Air World
ISBN: 1526750163
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 261

View

Book Description
A high-flying tour of British aviation history—and the sites where trials and triumphs took place. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, Britain was at the forefront of powered flight. Across the country, many places became centers of innovation and experimentation, as increasing numbers of daring men took to the skies. In 1799, at Brompton Hall, Sir George Cayley Bart put forward ideas that formed the basis of powered flight. There were balloon flights at Hendon from 1862, though attempts at powered flights from the area, later used as the famous airfield, don’t 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, unsuccessful attempts were made to build and fly a powered aircraft in 1906—but on June 8, 1908, A.V. Roe made what is considered 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 call itself the birthplace of British aviation. These are just a few of the places investigated 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.

Author: Brett Holman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317022637
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 303

View

Book Description
In the early twentieth century, the new technology of flight changed warfare irrevocably, not only on the battlefield, but also on the home front. As prophesied before 1914, Britain in the First World War was effectively no longer an island, with its cities attacked by Zeppelin airships and Gotha bombers in one of the first strategic bombing campaigns. Drawing on prewar ideas about the fragility of modern industrial civilization, some writers now began to argue that the main strategic risk to Britain was not invasion or blockade, but the possibility of a sudden and intense aerial bombardment of London and other cities, which would cause tremendous destruction and massive casualties. The nation would be shattered in a matter of days or weeks, before it could fully mobilize for war. Defeat, decline, and perhaps even extinction, would follow. This theory of the knock-out blow from the air solidified into a consensus during the 1920s and by the 1930s had largely become an orthodoxy, accepted by pacifists and militarists alike. But the devastation feared in 1938 during the Munich Crisis, when gas masks were distributed and hundreds of thousands fled London, was far in excess of the damage wrought by the Luftwaffe during the Blitz in 1940 and 1941, as terrible as that was. The knock-out blow, then, was a myth. But it was a myth with consequences. For the first time, The Next War in the Air reconstructs the concept of the knock-out blow as it was articulated in the public sphere, the reasons why it came to be so widely accepted by both experts and non-experts, and the way it shaped the responses of the British public to some of the great issues facing them in the 1930s, from pacifism to fascism. Drawing on both archival documents and fictional and non-fictional publications from the period between 1908, when aviation was first perceived as a threat to British security, and 1941, when the Blitz ended, and it became clear that no knock-out blow was coming, The Next War in the Air provides a fascinating insight into the origins and evolution of this important cultural and intellectual phenomenon, Britain's fear of the bomber.

Author: Keith Robbins
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198224969
Category : Great Britain
Languages : en
Pages : 962

View

Book Description
Containing over 25,000 entries, this unique volume will be absolutely indispensable for all those with an interest in Britain in the twentieth century. Accessibly arranged by theme, with helpful introductions to each chapter, a huge range of topics is covered. There is a comprehensiveindex.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Military art and science
Languages : en
Pages : 966

View

Book Description

Author: Hugh Driver
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 9780861932344
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 390

View

Book Description
A survey of the development of British military aviation from 1903 to 1914, revealing the consequences of its annexation by the state as a branch of armaments as an underlying cause of aircraft inadequacies on the outbreak of war. A mine of information, drawing on an impressive range of archives. It will become an important point of reference. ENGLISH HISTORICAL REVIEW This book aims to demonstrate how the crisis evident in British military aviation in the early years of the First World War was inherent in the entire development of aviation in the years preceding the conflict. After outlining the work of the early pioneers and the growth of an aviation industry as a branch of armaments, Dr Driver considers the objectives of the War Office in increasingly seeking to divert design development to their research establishment at Farnborough. He shows how the resultant virtual state monopoly in designand procurement had disastrous consequences for aircraft innovation and development, suffocating both competition and initiative, and leading to the maintenance of inadequate aircraft by the Royal Flying Corps following the outbreak of war. The continuing dispute and its culmination in the "Fokker Scourge" controversy of 1915-1916 graphically characterise the strained development of military-industrial relations in this area. Dr HUGH DRIVER gained an MA in War Studies from King's College London, and a D.Phil in modern history at Oriel College, Oxford.

Author: American Historical Association
Publisher: Oxford : Clarendon Press
ISBN: 9780198223894
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1636

View

Book Description

Author: Bruce Hales-Dutton
Publisher: Air World
ISBN: 1526775603
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 291

View

Book Description
The stories of the daredevils who attempted to fly over the English Channel—a history filled with triumphs, tragedies, and colorful characters. On July 25, 1909, a dapper, mustachioed Frenchman flying a flimsy, diaphanous airplane changed the status of a great nation. “England is no longer an island,” declared the Daily Mail. Lord Northcliffe, the newspaper’s proprietor, had put up the £1,000 prize for the first flight of the English Channel by the pilot of an airplane. In securing the prize for one of aviation’s most celebrated firsts, Louis Blériot had beaten his Anglo-French rival Hubert Latham. Six days earlier, Latham had become the first airman to make a forced landing on water when the engine of his elegant Antoinette monoplane failed while he attempted the crossing. This book explores the triumphs, tragedies, and many milestones in cross-channel flight, beginning back in July 1785 when John-Pierre Blanchard and John Jeffries made the first crossing, by balloon. Other flyers quickly followed Blériot so that Pierre Prier made the first non-stop London-Paris flight in April 1911 and Harriet Quimby became the first woman to fly the Channel a year later—though her historic accomplishment was overshadowed by the Titanic catastrophe. The book also charts other events in cross-Channel aviation such as the midair collision between the UK and France that led to a rudimentary system of air traffic control; the first cat to make the flight; the popular car ferry services of the 1950s and 1960s; and the coming of the jets—providing a colorful history of the era before the debut of the famed Channel Tunnel.