Flight archive going online (and offline)

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CammNut

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A head's up to those interested - I understand a substantial archive of past Flight issues in searchable and downloadable pdf form is to go on line at www.flightglobal.com, possibly as early as tomorrow.
 
It has got live at:

http://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/index.html
 
Thanks a lot CammNut

Lots of treasures to be discovered...


http://www.flightglobal.com/FlightPDFArchive/1955/1955%20-%200134.pdf
 
Hesham thankfully has browsed through the Flight pdf archive and discovered a lot of
interesting articles. Nevertheless, I would like to download and store it completely. But
still yet, I've found no other method, than choosing the year, right clicking on the thumb
nail and storing it. Not even the download managers I've tried, seem to offer a better
solution. What I want, is a method, that allows to select the year and then to store all
pages automatically. Or, even better, to store the whole archive ! Any clues ? ???
 
have a look at

www.websnake.com,

i've _not_ used it myself, but it might be what you're looking for, based on it's description.

cheers,
Robin.
 
My dear Schneiderman,

I download many issues,ask me if you need,maybe it is in my collection.
 
Thanks for the offer but it is the 'Search' facility that I really need
 
Thankfully, all the Flight issues can be downloaded as OCR processed pdf files, so a full-text search can
be done completely offline, just using the Acrobat Reader. If you have them in just a single folder, it may
take quite a while, but by using several sub folders, e.g. for the 1920's, 30's on so on, you can accelerate
the search and avoid too many hits.
 
Well they do say it is only down for maintenance and will be back online 'soon', but with the Christmas and New Year break I guess it will be a couple of weeks yet. I'll trust them to get it all back running.
 
There has been some discussion about this in Air Britain.
It seems that Flight was sold by RBI to DWW Media Group last year. Apparently subscribers have access to the archive going back to 2012 only.
It may well be that DWW haven't the rights to the full archive and it could well be the end of this resource.

I tried accessing the archive via the Internet Wayback Machine but while the homepage is on there, I'm sure the if all the PDF pages are and of course the search function is inoperable.
 
Good news.........but we need to wait. Extracts from an e-mail I just received from Flight

......We weren’t able to move the PDF archive when we moved the website to a new platform in December – and the task of moving the archive over in its current form is sizeable. So one of the plans for this year was to set up a project team to look into the most practical options to get the archive live again. ..................... we haven’t forgotten about the archive, but I don’t have any further update on when it could be restored.

Like the rest of us they are deeply affected by the global lockdown
 
Well its good news that it will be brought back and hasn't been forgotten about or lost due to rights issues with the change of ownership.
Guess we just have to ride it out, it would be optimistic to hope its back up before 2021 begins.
 
I would agree with that. The planned project to reinstate it has been put on hold during lockdown, which for them started when the Singapore airshow was cancelled at the beginning of the year.
 
The archive was useful, but it was also fairly poorly organised. There was no breakdown by issues, so you couldn't easily go look at a specific issue. Scan quality was also poor. Aviation Week's archive is much better organised. It'd be great if it could be organised a bit better on the new platform.
 
Not sure I agree with that, there were forward and back arrows to allow for scrolling through each issue plus the thumbnails down the side. Scan quality was/is quite adequate to read the text and image quality is a function of that of the originals, which is not that great pre-1945 or so. The search engine could have been better, but then you know the pitfalls with search engines yourself :). The biggest weakness was the missing issues which they could sure do with filling.
 
Schneiderman said:
Not sure I agree with that, there were forward and back arrows to allow for scrolling through each issue plus the thumbnails down the side. Scan quality was/is quite adequate to read the text and image quality is a function of that of the originals, which is not that great pre-1945 or so. The search engine could have been better, but then you know the pitfalls with search engines yourself :). The biggest weakness was the missing issues which they could sure do with filling.
Click to expand...

Page scans were just numbered per year so there was no way to tell programmatically start and end pages of each issue. Otherwise I'd have scripted a download of all the pages and reassembled them into issues.

With the Aviation Week archive, I found browsing issues from specific timeframes could be good for serentipitous discoveries you wouldn't find via search.
 
Ah, an IT/tech man talking :). Actually I pretty sure the numbering system was based on the volume (Roman) and issue numbers used by Flight, so something like quarterly I think. Page numbering was generally sequential through each volume, hence an individual issue would start where the previous one ended, apart from the Aircraft Engineering supplements which had their own page numbering and the adverts which went a, b, c..... All quite logical :) ;). Guaranteed to cause problems if you are trying to write a script for downloading but not if you are just browsing or searching. I've only occasionally run into problems while researching and these are usually due to the limitations of the search engine....Short and Airspeed throw up a lot of non-company related stuff for obvious reasons but there are others.
 
There has been quite a discussion about this amongst Air Britain members on their private exchange boards, so thought I would share an update here since most of you won't be AB members.
Some of the senior team have been in touch with Flight International. They confirmed that becoming a paid subscriber only gets you access to the news archive dating back to 2012 (£163.80 a year).

One of the Air Britain members did get an email from the editor. Basically Covid has ended all work on a planned transfer to their new platform and the current focus is on revenue and the Archive was a free service...

So we shouldn't hold our breath that this will be back any time soon and if it does come back I wouldn't be surprised to see a paywall.
 
Given the changes announced for the magazine and now this empty attempt to gain subscibers I don't see them having much of a future. Downsizing is rarely a solution to inherent problems, it merely extends the agony of the decline.
 
It will be a loss to find out the latest news of what is going on, there are not that many good non-US outlets for current news. As a magazine its days are probably numbered. I'm amazed they kept it going as a weekly for so long. I can see it becoming an industry journal, it has rather lost its public roots I think.
I wouldn't mind spending £3.15 a week if I was a regular buyer, but the truth is I brought maybe 1-2 copies a year at most.

I guess for the current owners the archive is only a cash asset to them, they don't really have an emotional company link to the material, if they can make profit from it then they are happy. If not its worth anything to them.
Aeroplane Monthly have tried to make more use of their archive, mainly for special publications and facsimiles but at least they regularly do dip into it. I doubt many actually look at the physical Flight archive. If Flight International does fold then the future of the archive would be of serious concern. Still hearing rumours of attempts to create a centralised aviation archive in the UK, but I would think the financial impacts of Covid-19 are going to be a stopper there. I think Air Britain does hold a large stash of Flights, but whether they have the scanning manpower is open to question and of course they don't own the copyright so couldn't distribute it even if they could scan everything.
 
The biggest loss for me is the excellent series of Annual Surveys from the 60s onwards covering military , ariliners, missiles etc.. I have some paper copies buried in various books and boxes. Having them online made me lazy. A bound volume of each of them from the 60s to the present would be great.
I am glad now that I got the material I needed back in the 90s when Aviation Bookshop was still in Holloway Road London.
 
It seems that the fantastic Flight International archives are no longer online at their original location, and it appears they will not be fixing them. Is there any other location for the archives?

If not, would anyone happen to have either of these articles:

Building the Big Picture
Graham Warwick
27 April 1985

Better Late than Never
Douglas
22 June 1993
 
Hi all, first time posting here for many years - if at all, I can’t remember..

I’m still lamenting the continued loss of the archive, and was looking for some advice, if at all possible?

If I wanted to try and find an article that was published in any given year, how can I go about this - did Flight ever make yearly indexes/glossaries that summarised the contents of all the issues that year?

(specifically, I’m looking for something that I think was in an issue from 1984/5, relating to “Aviation in the year 2059 AD”, by John E. Allan...)
 
mekon said:
Hi all, first time posting here for many years - if at all, I can’t remember..

I’m still lamenting the continued loss of the archive, and was looking for some advice, if at all possible?

If I wanted to try and find an article that was published in any given year, how can I go about this - did Flight ever make yearly indexes/glossaries that summarised the contents of all the issues that year?

(specifically, I’m looking for something that I think was in an issue from 1984/5, relating to “Aviation in the year 2059 AD”, by John E. Allan...)
Click to expand...

Ha ha - aren't we all?
 
You're talking about the article, with a contraption in the header, that reminds me of the movie Avatar,
aren't you ?
You got a PM ...
 

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Can any one who has access to these archives let me know how I might see what the magazine said about Lt C R Samson RN and the fact that he was the first man to take off in aircraft from a ship on 2nd May 1912?
 
flateric said:
AlienF22YF23 said:
flateric said:
Just in case, I've all archive downloaded, all 176Gb of it.
Click to expand...
May request for a copy of "Flight International - 03-09 April 2012"?

Please?
Click to expand...
check pm
Click to expand...
I have a question: Is there some way to put the archive on a server so that more people can access it (or have it "mirrored" or "twinned" there, so forum persons here could access it)? If this could be considered, that would be very helpful. I myself would like to access Flight International for the years 1969, 1971 and 1972. (All for Soviet space items)
 

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