Flightglobal provides copies of FLIGHT from the first issue, in 1909, to today on there web site (link below). This is a great resource of early flight and WW1 air operations, at least the years I’m interested in (1909-1919). The problem I was having was locating topics of interest, the indexes are missing from the web site. I decided it could be better and set out to reorganize the pages and get the indexes. But suddenly Flightglobal went off line for a few days, I panicked, I also realized this information could be removed from the web and I’ll never see it again. That did it, I downloaded them all (read the story below). All the pages from 1909 to 1919 are available on CD that I downloaded reorganized and added indexes to. I am asking $25 plus postage for a set of 12 disks that make researching these issues a pleasure, that’s just over $2 a disk so you see I’m not making a ton of money. I did the downloading, organizing, and providing the index along with a few missing pages, (not available on flightglobal’s web site), put them on 12 CDs with labels, as a service and this is what you are paying for. I do not own the rights to copies of the FLIGHT pages; they are free on the web (for now). I am hardly making any money on this deal but I feel this is such a valuable resource I wanted to share it with anyone who is interested – but also cover my expenses. While I consider the time I spent working on this 12 disk set was partially my hobby, and it was fun, I can’t afford to give them away for free. To get a set please send an e-mail to
[email protected], tell me how many sets you would like and give me your address. I will send you a request for payment from PayPal. Pay via Paypal and I’ll ship your order to you. If you have problems or more questions I am an e-mail away.
Here is the story behind the disks if you are interested.
Back in November 2007 I found
http://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/index.html -- I am very thankful to flightglobal, please check it out. However, I found their interface and page numbering so bad that I couldn’t find what I knew was there. I was so excited to find a resource like this; I wanted to have it on disks in my hot little hands and not on a web site that’s here today and gone tomorrow. My interest is early flight through WW1 so I wanted 1909 to 1920, sounds easy right? Well, the web site instructs the user to save, print, link to, copy and paste from, as well as contribute to the development of this unique record. OK, lets download a few years – alas the directories are password protected! Oh No! I will have to download each page ONE AT A TIME! Let’s see, 13,805 pages at, say 20 seconds per pick, download and save. That’s 76+ hours just downloading as fast as you can over and over. If I had I known how much work it would turn out to be, I would never have started. With Bob Dylan in my headphones I started downloading on Nov. 18, 2007. With my back aching, fingers going numb and blood shot eyes, for more than two weeks every day off and evening I spent filling up my hard drive with Gigs worth of files. Finally I’m done and now what do I do with 13,805 files?
Ready, let’s do some research (originally I was web searching information on WW1 turnbuckles when I stumbled on flightglobal). Wait! There’s only one index for 1910 – now what? OK, I’ll have to find some. I asked for help on The Cross and Cockade International (CCI) mailing list and slowly started to get replies. I got the index to 1916 from a gentleman in Virginia and about half of the 56 missing pages from other readers, all over the world. However, I resorted to locating and purchasing the other indexes from a fine gentleman Brian Cocks - Aviation Specialist Bookseller in England.
What do I mean by missing pages? There were 56 missing pages throughout the web site in the years – 1909 to 1920, that’s out of 13,805 pages (0.004% not bad) but that didn’t stop the consecutive number naming of the files, each page has a different sequential name, so as soon as we get to the first missing page – it throws the numbers off for the rest of the year’s files, they no longer correspond with the real page number – this makes it very hard to find a specific page number from an index without going too high or too low in your selections. Go ahead and see if you can find year 1911 page 1067. On my disks, when you open 1911, type 1067 in the page number box, press enter and it’s open.
Why don’t I just use the search feature on the web site? Well, when I started this project the search feature on the web was awful. It searched the whole data base 1909 to 2004, and you couldn’t specify the years to search. It was slow and gave you too much junk. With credit to Flightglobal the new search engine on their site works much better today. When I am searching for a name the Adobe file search function works well, but when I’m researching a subject I personally like to use an index.
The first disks I made had all the individual page files on it. There were about 1200 or so on each disk. I didn’t like it. Now to do any editing or combining I had to purchase a full official copy of Adobe Acrobat (not cheap). Next I combined pages into issue files, and now each disk has 52 files, one for each weekly issue. I still didn’t like it. I had to open too many files. I next put a full years worth into one giant file, this made searches easer and I liked it the best, although the files were getting very big; about a ½ a gig. This made the file very easy to read and jump around from page to page. This is the format I settled on.
After putting the index for each year with the files for that year I finally had 11 CDs each with an index and a years worth of files on one disk. I decided to search for something and suddenly realized I had to put all 11 disks in one at a time, look at the index then find the pages. Too much disk changing, there must be a better way. I figured all I needed to do was merge all the indexes into one large index for all 11 years and go from there. Not so easy. The pages are scans in PDF format and I couldn’t just merge them. My full copy of Adobe has an optical character recognition function, which would let me get the indexes into Microsoft Excel so I could sort them. It almost worked. The software had some problems decoding the old style text. It mixed up some of the numbers it read a 3 as an 8 and a 5 as a 6 and so on, but only sometimes. I had to verify every entry with the originals. The combined index has 18,257 line items, 90 pages long of three column newspaper size print. It took me almost 6 weeks to convert the indexes, but what an index it turned out to be. What follows is an excerpt from the index for Churchill, Winston. You didn’t know he was so active in WW1 did you?
Churchill, Winston-1911, 435.
Churchill, Winston-1913, 1237, 1315, 1330, 1413.
Churchill, Winston-1914, 45, 211, 214, 224, 231, 233, 237, 248, 256, 473, 610, 682.
Churchill, Winston-1915, 277, 283, 887, 907.
Churchill, Winston-1916, 227, 620, 780, 802.
Churchill, Winston-1917, 336, 573, 750.
Churchill, Winston-1919, 63, 179, 225, 269, 615.
Of course it starts with the name, then the year in BLUE (blue can't show in the post) followed by the referenced pages. I put the year in blue as I was having trouble mixing the year number with page numbers. I like to copy a reference section from the index and paste it into notepad to keep in the corner of my desktop for easy reference. Each year is opened one at a time and the referenced page numbers are checked. For me this works very well.
Now that I had a nice set of disks I offered them to some of my friends. I put nice little labels on them and they looked pretty good. Someone suggested that I put one on Ebay and see what happens. The reaction was very good and here we are today.
Thanks for your interest.
Hope to hear from you.
Derek Riley
[email protected]Vancouver, Washington USA
PS: Did I win the longest post award?
