Aeroplane Magazine British Fighters of WW2 Speciale Editie

FOLLOWING OUR FIRST edition of Aeroplane Collectors’ Archive,
British Bombers of World War Two, we now focus on the  ghters,
bringing you some of The Aeroplane’s  nest images from the war years
along with period cutaway drawings.
It must be emphasised that it is not the intention to give full details of
every type, these have been covered in many books, so only basic data for
early models of each type is given. Most of the images come from our archive
of over 40,000  ve-inch glass-plate negatives, others are from 50,000 35mm
strips, taken by Flight and The Aeroplane photographers, sister magazines
during the 1970s and 1980s, and to supplement these we have added others
from the  les which are interesting. A large proportion of the archive dating
from 1909 to the 1960s was gifted from Flight to The Aeroplane. The  nal
pages contain a selection of  ghters which were under development and had
 own between 1939 and 1945 but for various reasons did not enter service.
It is interesting to see that the  rst aircraft covered, the Gloster Gladiator,
was the RAF’s last biplane  ghter while the last, also from Gloster, was the
Meteor, the RAF’s  rst jet  ghter.
PHOTOGRAPHERS AND ARTISTS
The Aeroplane had a very talented sta of photographers including Charles
Sims, Alf Long and Maurice Rowe to name a few. Their standard equipment
in the early days was the First World War vintage Van Neck VN Press camera,
and Maurice Rowe recalls his memories. Starting at the bottom, he learned
to make up chemicals, dry photographic prints on rotary glazing drums and
how to operate a large camera on rails. Eventually becoming a photographer
for Temple Press, he says it was very much a do-it-yourself operation, as if a
large number of photographs were needed slides had to be reloaded, so on
an overnight assignment one struggled in a wardrobe in the bedroom to do
this, ensuring the door was tightly closed!