RIP Air International - A British aviation magazine from 1971 to 2025

fightingirish

fightingirish

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Hello folks,
I realized today that Key Publishing ceased publishing the British aviation magazine "Air International" after the July 2025 issue. :(

Joe Campion, an editor at the aviation magazine "Aviation News," announced that starting in August 2025, all future issues of "Aviation News" will embrace the spirit of Air International, featuring content that explores the forefront of aviation technology.

Part of me can understand the decision by Key Publishing to combine their many aviation magazines. Just compare their aviation magazines with similar content between "Aviation News", "Air International", "AirForces Monthly", "Combat Aircraft Monthly" or "Aeroplane" together. :confused:

I have fond memories of when my parents bought me an issue of "Air International" at the airport while we were traveling between Ireland and Germany. Even today, I still miss the x-ray drawings, cutaways, and illustrations by Mike Badrocke that were regularly published in this magazine. I bet other members, like @overscan (PaulMM), have similar sentiments and memories.
overscan (PaulMM) said:
I got a subscription to Air International for Christmas in 1985 (I was 12)
Click to expand...

Sorry to share the sad news, but I hope you have a good day regardless.:)

Source: Aviation News, August 2025, page 3
More sources might follow soon.
 
got every copy it first started life as air entusiast, the transformed into air international great magazine both for historical content and uptodate news and views last couple of years content became very thin. and not great value for money. But i do wish Key would use some of ther vast archive and maybe publish a mag along the lines of the (sadly missed ) AVation histoprian
 
In its early years, with William Green at the helm, it was the best aviation magazine in the world, acting as a continuation to Flying Review International. They spun off Air Enthusiast as a strictly historical journal with longer articles. About the time that the latter publication ceased publishing, Air International appeared to be transitioning to what they eventually became: a business magazine along the lines of Flight International or Aviation Week, and that's when I stopped buying it. There really isn't a single magazine today that has effectively replaced the original Air International so completely.
 
As someone who grew up in the former GDR, it was a special experience when a pen pal from East England sent me my first copy of AIR International. The three-page views in their admirably consistent style, the selection of topics, and the newsworthiness prompted me to become a subscriber as soon as I had the opportunity.
Even though I canceled this subscription a few years ago for reasons of space and money, opting instead to buy individual issues from time to time, I will never forget the importance this magazine had in sparking my interest in aviation. The disappearance of AIR Enthusiast was already a heavy blow, and now the range of high-quality aviation magazines is becoming even more limited.
Thank you to everyone who contributed to maintaining AIR International at such a remarkably high standard over many years.
 
I'll never forget the anticipation of the magazine dropping onto the hallway carpet each month. What would be in this month's issue?

While William Green and Gordon Swanborough (Finescroll Ltd / Tri Service Press) were in charge, it was unrivalled I think. Artwork, cutaways, and detailed articles by knowledgeable authors and researchers. Their news section was populated by contributors around the world. It really broadened my knowledge with articles on historic, current and future aircraft. In hindsight, some of the articles were written by authors who wrote a book on the subject around the time of the article, which makes sense, and the news section had a certain debt to someone speedily reading Aviation Week, but that doesn't detract from its brilliance.

I think it was around 1991 that it was sold to Key, and for around another 10-15 years it was still basically similar, though I no longer bought every issue. It then drifted away from its core and eventually dropped all historic coverage.

Green and Swanborough were pretty special, enthusiasts not businessmen. Not all their work holds up to modern scrutiny, but it was put together well and with love.
 
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So many great memories of reading AIR INTERNATIONAL, which my dad would buy every month from Paris's Brentano's bookshop, which had a fantastic English-language press outlet back then. Green and Swanborough were the master of their trade: a very well documented, proofread and reliable magazine tending to the expectations of those who craved vintage aircraft as much as those who wanted to know the latest news and ongoing projects. Mr. Swanborough even replied to me personally once, after I wrote to ask a question about a then-mysterious U.S. Coast Guard designation. I cherish that letter to this day! But of course, the latter years under Key Publishing were nowhere near as thrilling, and didn't show quite such high standards. Still, it's sad to see such a milestone go away. I've got virtually every single issue from 1971 to 1988 I think, and still quite a few after that, and I know they are nowhere near obsolete or irrelevant, nor are they about to be any time soon!
 
I have folders full of Air Int articles and shelves of the bound copies which used to appear now and again from its early confusing International/Enthusiast days.

Lately, I only bought it as holiday reading at Newcastle Airport. Last week, I did my holiday mag buy and there was no Air Int in WH Smiths and I mentioned that to Mrs CJ, who opined that it might have shut down. As ever Mrs CJ was correct.

I was a monthly buyer of Air Int in its glory days of the 70s and 80s, avidly awaiting the next In Soviet Service or Wings of the Navy but only the odd copy after it went too civvie and spacey (dare I say modern?) for me in the 90s.

Ah, well, we slip further into the hands of shouty Yanks and their bollockspeak on YouTube.

However, there is a new hope...

Chris
 
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They were very good people; they agreed to publish my drawings on the Spanish DC-2s when no one else wanted to do it. I will always be grateful to them for the enormous amount of information I gained from their almost perfect publication structure.
 

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Well that sucks! Flight every week and Air International every month from the WH Smith's in the high street were the main ways I found out about planes as a kid.

The webpage is still up. They could at least cover the corpse.
www.key.aero

AIR International

AIR International Magazine has, over the years, established a reputation for authoritative reporting. The award-winning editorial team regularly visits trade
www.key.aero www.key.aero

Chris Gibson, what is the new hope?

1758265888207.jpeg
 
That is sad news.
I remember about 20 years ago when Air Enthusiast closed and they merged it with Air International but that phase didn't last long and they quietly dropped the subtitle. I suspect Aviation News will eventually subsume it totally.

I stopped buying Air International around 2010ish when it was becoming a picture book with little text and shallow articles that were barely disguised PR releases. Having flicked through a couple of recent issues it seemed to have regained some of its quality.

I note that Flight International has now gone to the monthly magazine, not surprising since a weekly was probably overkill.

Last month I brought my first issue of Flypast for about 20 years. Again, it had become a glorified picture book. It's improved from that, but it's large font and shorter articles are evidently aimed towards the more general reader. Aeroplane Monthly is still the better mag for historical coverage in my opinion. If they ever merge Aeroplane and Flypast then that would be a sad day.

Ultimately I guess with declining readerships all the magazines will fold and we'll be stuck with online content only. Unless you subscribe its becoming harder to find magazines on the High Street, at least in the UK.
 
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Hood said:
That is sad news.
I remember about 20 years ago when Air Enthusiast closed and they merged it with Air International but that phase didn't last long and they quietly dropped the subtitle. I suspect Aviation News will eventually subsume it totally.
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For the record, the magazine started as "Air Enthusiast"... Then they launched "Air Enthusiast Quarterly", and soon the two titles became "Air International" and "Air Enthusiast", which was easier to differentiate them.
Hood said:
I stopped buying Air International around 2010ish when it was becoming a picture book with little text and shallow articles that were barely disguised PR releases. Having flicked through a couple of recent issues it seemed to have regained some of its quality.
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Not just shallow articles. What struck me in that magazine and others over the past 20 years was the degraded photo quality standard. It often seemed like they printed photos from average digital copies rather than proper original film photos.
Hood said:
I note that Flight International has now gone to the monthly magazine, not surprising since a weekly was probably overkill.
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Agreed, but it didn't use to be until the 1990s. I guess the end of the Cold War changed that in part.
Hood said:
Last month I brought my first issue of Flypast for about 20 years. Again, it had become a glorified picture book. It's improved from that, but it's large font and shorter articles are evidently aimed towards the more general reader. Aeroplane Monthly is still the better mag for historical coverage in my opinion. If they ever merge Aeroplane and Flypast then that would be a sad day.
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Yeah. But then again are two very similar magazines needed in the current press debacle?
Hood said:
Ultimately I guess with declining readerships all the magazines will fold and we'll be stuck with online content only. Unless you subscribe its becoming harder to find magazines on the High Street, at least in the UK.
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That's where it's all headed. Fortunately we'll still have the old paper mags to love and cherish!
 
The rising cost of magazines coupled in UK with the supply of old books in Charity Shops at low prices reduced my purchase of them to copies found in flea markets or Charity Shops.
I would now and then buy a new copy in what used to be Smiths (still is in Oxford for some reason) if an article was useful enough to be cut out and put inside one of my books.
The watershed for me though was 1991. Once the Cold War ended my interest focussed on revelations about unbuilt projects. Endless photos from Desert Storm did not fill the gap left by the NATO Warsaw Pact coverage.
The Internet and the emergence of cheap mobile phones has made even an old codger like me rely on what Gordon Brown called the Interweb.
 
Kiltonge said:
For an historical journal that's fine.

For an industry news and analysis rag, everything will be history by the time it's printed! Why even bother?
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For those in the industry, they will be getting all the news on a daily basis as it arises via the internet, so there can't be much life left in the paper quarterly version.

Flight Global offer a free weekly newsletter service (not clear how long it is free for) and a subscription service with access to much more
www.flightglobal.com

Flight International magazine

Find all Flight International magazine’s award-winning aviation and aerospace industry coverage in one place
www.flightglobal.com www.flightglobal.com
www.flightglobal.com

Subscribe to FlightGlobal Premium

We are home to the latest news, comment and analysis for the airline, aerospace and defence sectors.
www.flightglobal.com www.flightglobal.com
 
To be honest, the Air International started declining in the late 1990s. Some time ago I had a chance of browsing some recent (max. few years old) issues and everything good was gone. The contents had basically become a sort "aviation-related administration magazine", articles being nothing more than disguised commercials. Instead of illustrations concentrating on the aircraft and their features, many articles had more photos of various managers than of the aircraft! Total waste of paper.
 
uk 75 said:
The Internet and the emergence of cheap mobile phones has made even an old codger like me rely on what Gordon Brown called the Interweb.
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Huh - I thought it's correctly called the internet tubes? But that may just be one of those Brit vs. Yankee joint language separation issues...
 
Pasoleati said:
To be honest, the Air International started declining in the late 1990s. Some time ago I had a chance of browsing some recent (max. few years old) issues and everything good was gone. The contents had basically become a sort "aviation-related administration magazine", articles being nothing more than disguised commercials. Instead of illustrations concentrating on the aircraft and their features, many articles had more photos of various managers than of the aircraft! Total waste of paper.
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It seems we all pretty much agree on the fact that it started declining in quality in the early 1990s.
The change in editorial emphasis, the departure of the founders (and of the generation of authors that had lived through the entire golden years of aviation), the end of the Cold War, the loss of quality in photo reproduction... all of these factors combined to make the magazine a lot less interesting.

As for the advent of the internet... it has ushered in a totally new era, not only in publishing, but in the very manner that people apprehend knowledge. Books and magazines are already a thing of the past for a large part of those born in the 21st century. And even those born before that, if not accustomed to serious research work or specialized in any research field, truly believe what my ex-wife used to say (as a not-too-subtle way of discouraging my spending): "Why bother buying books? Everything is on the internet now." What is sad is the fact that all these people don't realize the huge loss of data quantity AND quality. And even on the web, I'm shocked to see the amount of stuff that you could find back in the 2000s and that is no longer there.
 
The demise of so many interesting sites I used to visit led me to try and save pages and pages in various ways. I gave up when it dawned on me I hardly ever browsed them and worse still I had failed to index them.
Now I just look at a few quality sites and surf much less than I did ten or twenty years ago. More time to drink Staropramen and enjoy my toys (Nurse the Screens!)
 
Stargazer said:
And even those born before that, if not accustomed to serious research work or specialized in any research field, truly believe what my ex-wife used to say (as a not-too-subtle way of discouraging my spending): "Why bother buying books? Everything is on the internet now."
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Even educational libraries believe that now. Until they can't afford the subscriptions any more, then you've lost the back issues in the skip and you can't access them online either.....

Stargazer said:
And even on the web, I'm shocked to see the amount of stuff that you could find back in the 2000s and that is no longer there.
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The Wayback Machine is handy for retrieving some of that, but with the big snag that if you don't know the original website url it's undiscoverable and in many cases the images are lost.

I've been able to find a few Flight PDFs that way, but manually changing the url for the many thousands of pages is just not feasible and the WM coverage is very, very patchy.

In the age of the bot scavengers I wonder how long it will be before everything disappears behind paywalls?*
*On the basis of Descartes' principle, "I am a sucker who pays therefore I am human".
 
Hood said:
Even educational libraries believe that now. Until they can't afford the subscriptions any more, then you've lost the back issues in the skip and you can't access them online either.....
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In an ideal world, publishers would make all their back issues available online, either free of charge or for a small fee.
It was nice when Aviation Week and Space Technology did just that (until they changed their mind about free access...)

Hood said:
The Wayback Machine is handy for retrieving some of that, but with the big snag that if you don't know the original website url it's undiscoverable and in many cases the images are lost.
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The problem with the Wayback Machine is that not all web pages were archives there. For a start, US websites seem to have been favored in the captures. Also, it's not uncommon to find the welcome page and maybe a couple more, but not the rest of the site, or maybe the pages, but not the photos or the linked documents. If no-one visited certain pages on the days that the captures were made, then these pages are lost forever.

Hood said:
I've been able to find a few Flight PDFs that way, but manually changing the url for the many thousands of pages is just not feasible and the WM coverage is very, very patchy.
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The very old Flight pages are still out there, at least for the most part, but as separate pages, which renders the task of retrieving a specific issue extremely tedious.
Hood said:
In the age of the bot scavengers I wonder how long it will be before everything disappears behind paywalls?*
*On the basis of Descartes' principle, "I am a sucker who pays therefore I am human".
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Yep. Plus nothing really belongs to you anymore. You simply no longer own a software, for instance, you are subjected to its online download and update, and lose it once you stop paying. Mark my words: if things continue at the current rate, a decade or two from here they'll be charging us for the air we breathe.
 

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