Internet Archive - classic aviation magazines (Aviation Week, Flight etc.)

[keithwwalker]

Aviation News Archive:
Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine has an archive for a fee service on their website.
Archive.org actually has the same content for free. There are PDF format available, but it is low resolution.
To get the highest resolution, choose CBZ format (which is a zip type format designed for magazine or comic book reading that displays jpegs in a book format), and then you will get the full resolution - but you must download a special reader.
The issues are great for period type ads, and every so often there are great detail articles about prototype aircraft.
Here are the glory years 1936-47, but you can navigate and search for whatever issue they have regardless of year
Aviation News Archive

 

[keithwwalker]

To view CBZ files, I use this software

Comical

Download Comical for free. Cross-platform CBR/CBZ (comic book) reader. Comical is a portable CBR and CBZ viewer written in C++ using wxWidgets. It supports multiple image formats and uses high-quality image scaling algorithms to fit pages onscreen.

comical.sourceforge.net

It isn't fancy, but is a concise software package and works well enough.
Just to give an idea of the relative size of the archive versions, The December 01 1942 issue under PDF is 14mb and is barely legible. The CBZ version is 103mb and looks to be scanned at 150 or 300 dpi.

 

[keithwwalker]

Use the search function here

Welcome to the Complete Aviation Week Archive

Enjoy unlimited access to the Complete Aviation Week Archive. Every issue, every page, every article we have ever published.

archive.aviationweek.com

Then you can find page numbers of the aircraft you are interested in. The Archive.org has pages scanned two at a time, so it takes a bit to find the exact page number.
The search will reveal three different results (which is helpful):
Articles
Ads
Images

 

[keithwwalker]

Another hint, is that the Archive.org site has page scans, but you have to dig down to find them in the Download options page, click 'show all' and then 'view contents' of the cbz archive and there are your individual page scans!

 

[BigRIJoe]

Thanks for the heads up. I do notice that the series stops at 1963. Any idea why?

 

[Silencer1]

Hi!

There were a huge and well selected collection of classic aviation magazines for many decades, available for viewing and downloading - in various size and quality.
Please note, that PDFs, available for dowinload are very modest quality, and the "SINGLE PAGE PROCESSED JP2 ZIP" option (and similar for some issues" offer high-quality scans.

Enjoy!

For example:
"Aviation Week" of 1942


"Flight"


"Convair Traveller" - company' corporate magazine, describing the works on the contemporary projects

 

[Stargazer]

Does anyone know why the Internet Archive can no longer be accessed? And if so, how long until it's back online?
It's been several months now, and I truly miss that most essential resouce.

 

[okakac]

The courts decided against them. During the Corona pandemic they had allowed downloading of all sorts of material and were sued by the publishers, l think.

 

[Stargazer]

The courts decided against them. During the Corona pandemic they had allowed downloading of all sorts of material and were sued by the publishers, l think.

In other words, with the Internet Archive down and Google's removal of the "access cache version" option, there is now no way left to access any kind of cached versions for old websites... The wealth of information that once existed on the web is all but gone, unless personal copies/captures were done. The World Wide Web is fast becoming a far cry from the proverbial "information highway"...

 

[Dilandu]

Does anyone know why the Internet Archive can no longer be accessed? And if so, how long until it's back online?
It's been several months now, and I truly miss that most essential resouce.

They are suffering DDOS attack, it seems. They managed to lost their user database (with 31 millions profiles), and then got DDOS'ed. Quite probably, the events are connected.

 

[Dilandu]

P.S. Some hacker group seems to took responsibility, claiming that they attacked Internet Archives because "it's American, and America support Israel war in Gaza". I kinda suspect that they are just boasting for someone else job, but... everything is probable.

 

[TomS]

The courts decided against them. During the Corona pandemic they had allowed downloading of all sorts of material and were sued by the publishers, l think.

The only thing affected by the court case was IA's "Open library" where they were lending out electronic copies of physical in-print books. They would probably have ben able to continue doing that if they had not taken the step back in 2020 of lending infinite copies of their books. Publishers were a bit vexed by that, since they do actually rely on making money off e-book sales and library e-lending.

500,000 Books Have Been Deleted From The Internet Archive’s Lending Library

If you found out that 500,000 books had been removed from your local public library, at the demands of big publishers who refused to let them buy and lend new copies, and were further suing the lib…

www.techdirt.com

 

[Stargazer]

The only thing affected by the court case was IA's "Open library" where they were lending out electronic copies of physical in-print books. They would probably have ben able to continue doing that if they had not taken the step back in 2020 of lending infinite copies of their books. Publishers were a bit vexed by that, since they do actually rely on making money off e-book sales and library e-lending.

Okay, fair enough, but that's only the books. And even then, the current ones at that.
What about the tons of public domain material that used to be there?
And what about the archived websites, which had nothing to do with books at all?!

 

[TomS]

Okay, fair enough, but that's only the books. And even then, the current ones at that.
What about the tons of public domain material that used to be there?
And what about the archived websites, which had nothing to do with books at all?!

That still exists. It's been DDOSed, meaning it wasn't possible to reach, but it has not been destroyed.

 

[Archibald]

Crap. Hope is restored to working order. It is a cornerstone of the Internet. I dug out a ton of dead links through it, including on that very forum.

 

[GTX]

Hackers have threatened the internet's 'time machine' — and our digital history

A digital repository of billions of web pages, images and books is offline after being hacked, with millions of users' data also stolen.

www.abc.net.au

 

[Grey Havoc]

Break out the Black ICE!

 

[Stargazer]

The Internet Archive seems to be back, but for how long? Server reaction time is ridiculously slow for me here in France, wonder if it's the same for everyone?

 

[airman]

The Internet Archive seems to be back, but for how long? Server reaction time is ridiculously slow for me here in France, wonder if it's the same for everyone?

i use alternate dns like 1.1.1.1 or google dns.