I have been around the Internet or World Wide Web since before it was, I have been a user of the resource since its inception and used a number of dialup Aviation BBS services before that. At their peak there were probably in excess of twenty thousand BBS’s, of these there were tens and possibly as many as a hundred purely devoted to Aviation.

As to what happened to them, well in the early 90’s what we now call the Internet or World Wide Web came along and the BBS and the millions of posts that they held went the way of the Dodo. With very little being preserved in any form, I was a member of a number of these bulliten boards and some had several hundred thousand posts.

My first dedicated service (what would now be called an ISP) was Compuserve, joining in 1982 – why did I join. What made it apealing to me was access to the Airline Ticketing system S.A.B.R.E., where the bill for tickets and some hotels came in at the end of the month from Compuserve – this could be some time after the flights or hotel visit.

But back to the gist of the post I guess, many of these BBS were run on machines owned by individuals and accesed using a dialup modem. Where like minded individualls could contribute and in many cases speak to people who had first hand information. To my knowledge, very little of this information was saved and joins the other information lost forever.

In the last year I have moved from Skye where I was a regular visitor to a number of local-ish airstrips, I was a frequent visitor to Ashaig or Broadford and Plockton and was at times surprised by the visitors that arrived there. What was much more surprising was the percentage of visitors that were not officially recorded, I would estimate that between 30 and 50 percent of visits went unrecorded at Broadford.

Not that Broadford was a busy airstrip, the most visitors seen there were a dozen Robinson R22’s on the ground together and at Plockton about seven or eight aircraft. But I have seen RAF C-130’s doing touch and goes at Broadford, which came as quite a surprise – and is probably not recorded anywhere else.

Once the commecialisation of the Internet began in the early 90’s there were a number of associated problems that came with it, primarily if people weren’t prepared to pay for the hosting of information – then it vanished. How much has gone, estimates vary but likely a quarter of what has been out there is now gone. In the 43 years since I first went “Online”, I have seen much disappear and expect to see much more go the same way.

I came accross this site some time ago, as a research resource it does tick a number of boxes. The objectives of the site are laudable, however given how precious many people are about their collections of pictures I think that they will fall short. Not due to ambition, but due to the attitude of collectors.

The stated ambitions is; “The aim of AirHistory.net is to create an archive that will ultimately hold photos of every aircraft ever built, in all its colour schemes and markings, in every configuration it ever flew, at every event or in every country they ever visited, and in every collection of preserved aircraft of which they were part.”, this is a significant challenge.

I have watched the site grow and have increasing numbers of images added, with a good support base. The whole image set now exceeds 350,000 images of around 160,000 frames, which is a good start. However the practicalities of this ambitios plan are stagering, lets take a worked example – of just a single aircraft.

So if we assume a fairly low resolution digital photograph or scan of a physical print, as being half a megabyte in size. It all doesn’t sound too bad at this point, this aircraft is likely to visit only a few locations a year – not that likely to be more than twenty. This gives us a nice clean 10 megabytes, however if we start adding markings changes and most aircraft go through a number of these – then over a fairly short period of time we have twenty or thirty megabytes of data.

But if we stick with 10 Mb for a frame (The same frame at 20 locations, without a paint or registration change.), taking the US Civil Register as is which is approximately 400,000 current frames and over 100,000 deregistered frames we arrive at a mere 5 Tb assuming a single colour scheme or registration for the life of the aircraft.

Here is an example of an aircraft life;

This frame has had 13 changes during its life and would probably generate 100 Mb of data on its own, if the images exist. Airlines change liveries fairly regularly, so I think that the data storage requirement would run possibly to 100’s of Terabytes.

There is also so much duplication of effort, the airframe above can be found here

So two years and one week ago, it was the Royal International Air Tattoo 2019 at Fairford. Given that the world has learned about Covid-19 in the intervening time, it may be some time before there are Air Shows like Fairford again.

As has become custom, we bunch of happy spotters no longer attend the show – especially as we feel that it doesn’t represent great value. We view the flying display from Totterdown Hil, which as it turns out is practically in the centre of the flying area. With a visit to the Western end of the airfield on departures day, the two days costing less than a standard entry on the flying days.

I’m not saying that the show isn’t good value for money, in some respects it is indeed very good value – but we are of an age where the preferred show weekend is more civilised in its approach.

We have attended most of these shows, it used to be that during the summer months we would attend two or three shows a month from May through to September with the highlights being Greenham, Mildenhall, Upper Heyford, Duxford and Leuchars although there were many others.

The selection of photographs were all either taken from Totterdown Hill, or they were taken on the departure day. Click on one and open the Gallery, have a better look at the images.

The 2019 RIAT could have been quite a unique show from a spotters perspective, it could well be the last time that the Phantom and the AV8 were seen at the same show in Europe.

There was a bit of nostalgia when we saw them, gone are the days where you could log 200 of these types alone over a weekend in the UK and you might see half a dozen visiting Phantoms over a weekend as well.

The Airshow now a days is not a cheap experience, well not much is cheap really – but going to Fairford with a couple of older kids as a familly is now over £200 for the admission for a familly of four, younger children have free entry but if you are taking older teenagers be prepared.

I know that the shows should pay their way and that what proceeds there are go to a good cause, but it is still not a cheap day out by any measure.

There were a few familiar faces down on the mound for this one, there aren’t so many of these around now as they are starting to get a bit long in the tooth.

But it is nice to see these still flying, there are very few of the early models left with the original engines – a sign of the greening of the world. There are number still in service with the IAF, not sure if it is seven or nine.

This is the second one to visit in as many weeks and its likely to be back for COP 26 in November.

An other visitor of note was the MC-12S 12-00278, one of the EMARSS equiped MC-12’s operated by the US Army – the aircraft has been extensively modified with the addition of numerouse antennae and a satalite communications system.

So here we are well into July, there still isn’t much flying – in fact Glasgow still looks a bit like a parking lot. Although there are some flights running, I’m guessing that the time for the passenger transport side to get back to normal will be protracted.

It’s strange to think that the number of flights is actually increasing, as there isn’t very much visual evidence of the increases. What will the next couple of years bring to air travel, well it is hard to second guess the government on the relaxation of rules. The need for testing will increase the cost and the time required for flying anywhere, so other means of transport may well be quicker.

Travelling between the major cities by train will become more appealing from a time and convenience perspective, even if it doesn’t seem to have the same cachet.

Given the increased checkin window required for Covid-19 testing and showing proof of vaccination, it is probably significantly faster going by train from say Glasgow to London. Going any significant distances overseas is still probably where the air traffic is going to win out, there’s not much prospect of going to Mallorca on the train from Glasgow easilly.