For a glimpse of what's in Issue No 47 of The Aviation Historian, click/tap images below-right to view larger PDF versions of our tasters featuring just ten of its 132 pages.

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Deal of the Century?

Professor Keith Hayward FRAeS uses the available contemporary official documents to piece together the political backdrop to the aviation aspects of the UK's Al-Yamamah military sales programme to Saudi Arabia

Pride of the Squadron

In March 1944 RAAF Hampden pilot Jimmy Catanach was one of 50 airmen murdered by the Gestapo during the Great Escape. Kristen Alexander chronicles the flying life and shocking death of this cheerful and popular Australian

America's Whirlybird Airlines Pt 2

In the concluding half of his series on the USA's rotary-wing airlines, David H. Stringer describes the slow but perhaps inevitable decline of the whirlybird operators

Sure Fire

Continuing our series on British aerial weapons, master illustrator Ian Bott joins forces with armament specialist Mark Russell to describe the development and operation of the ubiquitous Lewis Automatic Machine-Gun

Putting on a Show (Navy-style)

The late Cdr John Ford recalls coming off a carrier tour only to be tasked with organising a Supermarine Scimitar formation aerobatic display team for the 1961 season

Collision Course

The coming together of a Trans-Australia Airlines 727 and CP Air DC-8 at Sydney in January 1971 raised some difficult legal questions about cockpit voice recorders at a crucial time in their development, relates Dr Peter Hobbins

Guide & Seek

Although too late to see action in the Second World War, the USAF's Razon and Tarzon radio-guided bombs were used operationally – and successfully – during the Korean conflict, as Michael Napier explains

The Shah's Uranium Explorers

Iranian aviation historian Babak Taghvaee takes a look at the fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft used for uranium exploration for Iran's pre-revolution nuclear programme

Mr Armstrong's Stepping Stones Pt 1

Ralph Pegram opens a two-part series on Canadian-born inventor Edward Armstrong’s ambitious inter-war scheme to develop a chain of "Seadromes" across the Atlantic

Pushing the Envelope: Sturgeon & Wyvern

Our series based on a set of flight-test reports written by the pilots of the Royal Aircraft Establishment's Aero Flight and presented verbatim continues with carrier trials of the Short Sturgeon I and Eagle-engined Westland Wyvern TF.1

Metamorphosis Pt 2

Graham Skillen concludes his two-part series on the transition of the Miles Aerovan into the Shorts Skyvan

Touching the Secret

Colonel John W. Zink recalls his hush-hush posting to the "white world" of Nellis to participate in the flight test programme of the Lockheed F-117A Nighthawk in 1985

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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.