What is the "Alpha Archive" ?

Alpha Archive, according to my copy of The Aviation Historian is "a California-based privately-owned collection of rare and previously unpublished photographs of classic American civil and military aircraft."

So we're none the wiser.

Chris
 
Has Gene Boswell contributed to the Alpha Archive ? It seems that the Alpha Archive has many North American Aviation photos...
 
I just found out on WW2aircraft that it was a fictitous name that Michael O'Leary used to avoid dealing with Boeing image licensing. That ticked off a lot of contributors to his P-51/P-82 works for not properly crediting them. After Bill Marshall and Lowell Ford wrote their book for the P-51B, a lot of the stuff they accumulated was donated to Boeing archives. And let's just say that Mr. O'Leary isn't high up on Boeing's Christmas card list.
 
"Author and photographer Michael O'Leary is well known in the field of aviation journalism, having served for more than 20 years as editor of Air Classics and Warbirds International magazines."
 
This came from one of the authors of that P-51B book (both of whom sent copies of photos and other documents to Boeing after the book was completed). And it seems that O'Leary, like everyone else from now on, will have to deal with Boeing's licensing/legal team to use NAA photos and documents in any further works. Not to mention (at least according to who I spoke to about this) that his lack of proper credit did irk a lot of contributors to some of his works.

These by the way refer to period photographs that were taken during or after World War II that were likely at one point taken or owned by North American. Granted, though Boeing is interested in preserving as much as they can as far as NAA went, a lot of stuff got thrown out or lost after Rockwell merged with NAA in the late 1960s.
 
And yes, I can't believe to a degree that I'm sort of sticking up for a big corporation, but, one, I sort of got a bit suspicious when I looked for photo credits in my copy of the Building the P-51 Mustang book and I only found like one image that was clearly credited aside from the Alpha Archive.

And two, I'm looking for images of the lightweight Mustangs and P-51H and P-82, such as rare images and technical and mock up/wind tunnel images, preferably digital. So far, SDASM has been a good place to look and get them from, though I've had little luck elsewhere aside from random finds on the internet. I do have plenty of books, the only thing that's a negative there is that I don't have a great place in my house right now to sit down and read them.

So from that standpoint, I'm def. a bit disappointed that it seems that the Alpha Archive doesn't really exist like I sort of hoped it would.
 

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