The Aviation Historian
Current edition cover
Viewing model seaplane in shop window

For a glimpse of what's in Issue No 46 of The Aviation Historian, click/tap images below-right to view larger PDF versions of our tasters featuring just ten of its 132 pages.

Look inside the current issue of TAH

Bang vs Buck

Professor Keith Hayward FRAeS digs deep into the archives to investigate why only two of the five crew members of the RAF's V-bombers were provided with ejection-seats — an issue of practicality or cost?

V for Vindictive

One of the Royal Navy's first aircraft carriers, HMS Vindictive saw action in the Baltic in 1919 and went on to become a pioneer of aircraft catapult operations. Professor Aidan Dodson tells the full story of this oft-forgotten pioneer

Léon-Arsène Brissard

Jean-Christophe Carbonel's Ces Hommes Magnifiques series on early French aviation makes a return with Léon-Arsène Brissard's ducted-fan contraption of 1914

Get Smart!

Continuing our series on British aerial weapons, master illustrator Ian Bott joins forces with Chris Gibson to describe the development and operation of the American-designed but British-built Paveway laser-guided bomb

Wings Over Peru: the Curtiss Hawk biplane

Amaru Tincopa's occasional series on the history of Peruvian military aviation focuses this time on the Curtiss Hawk biplane in Cuerpo de Aviación del Perú service

America's Whirlybird Airlines pt 1

Renowned American airline historian David H. Stringer opens a new two-part series on the genesis and development of the USA's commercial rotary-wing operators

Great Expectations

Using recently discovered documents and illustrations, Tony Buttler AMRAeS explores Australia's ambitious Commonwealth CA-23 post-war indigenous jet fighter project and the UK Ministry of Supply's evalution of it

Metamorphosis: From Aerovan to Skyvan pt 1

In the first half of a two-part article, former Shorts Flight Engineer Graham Skillen charts the transition from Miles's post-war Aerovan to its 1960s progeny, the Shorts Skyvan

The British Army & the Jumping Jeep

Project Prodigal called for an all-terrain vehicle capable of sustained flight for the British Army. Chris Gibson takes a look at the ambitious proposals of Handley Page and BAC

Prize Pipistrello!

Andrew Thomas and Giovanni Massimello relate how an Italian bomber raid on an RAF base in Aden in June 1940 led to the first wartime capture of an Italian aircraft

Pushing the Envelope

Having acquired a set of flight-test reports written by the pilots of the Royal Aircraft Establishment's Aero Flight, we open a new series in association with the Farnborough Air Sciences Trust, in which we present the reports verbatim. We begin with the carrier trials of the Supermarine Type 510

Le Fiasco!

The late Cdr John Ford recalls his participation in the 1959 Daily Mail Blériot Anniversary Air Race in a Tiger Moth


Look inside back-issues of TAH

You can check the content of all available back-issues of The Aviation Historian in two ways:

  1. Visit our Single issues page, where you can see the front cover of each issue, read a one-sentence list of the most significant articles, and view/download a PDF of that issue's contents page.
  2. Visit our Index page, where you can download a free PDF of our regularly-updated index to everything we've published, compiled by author, title and subject. So if you want to know where to find information about the CIA’s secret airline, or a photograph of the cockpit of a Vickers Vespa, or how stewardesses faked hot toddies for a cabinful of passengers when someone had nicked the brandy from the galley, you can zero-in on the exact TAH issue you need.
In the current issue:

Bang vs Buck - The RAF's V-Force and the question of rear-crew ejection seats (double-page preview spread)

Léon-Arsène Brissard (double-page preview spread)

Get Smart - Paveway & the RAF (double-page preview spread)

From Aeorvan to Shorts Skyvan (double-page preview spread)

The British Army & the Jumping Jeep (double-page preview spread)