Historic Aerial Photo Resources

I could not get anything searching on Fairey but found them with FSL.

This is the link to Fairey Surveys which I used. The fist lot are Kenya but the rest is Scotland and a touch of Northumberland. Both should give the same result.

ncap.org.uk/search/relation/59089?free-t...5613.69199&layers=BT

ncap.org.uk/search/relation/59089?free-text=yes

Large tracts of England including most of London and the outskirts are now available via the NCAP website. They date from 1973 to 1993 and some areas are covered by more than one era. This appears to be the Aerofilms stock and is quite large.

NCAP haven't broadcast this yet and the last time I found new frames they disappeared for 12 months! Hopefully these will stay as there are some good time gap fillers. One example was Bassingbourn with runways intact!

Peter wrote:

Large tracts of England including most of London and the outskirts are now available via the NCAP website. They date from 1973 to 1993 and some areas are covered by more than one era. This appears to be the Aerofilms stock and is quite large.

NCAP haven't broadcast this yet and the last time I found new frames they disappeared for 12 months! Hopefully these will stay as there are some good time gap fillers. One example was Bassingbourn with runways intact!

Not seeing any earlier than 1972 at the moment but even that can be useful.

A new batch though not many are aeronautical, they have some unidentified ones there if anyone has any ideas.

[h=1] Richard Shirk Collection now accessible [/h] Over 700 photographs taken by a US airman during the Second World War are now accessible on the NCAP website.

Richard Shirk was a professional photographer who enlisted in the US Army Air Force and served with the 155th Night Photographic Reconnaissance squadron in England, France and Germany between 1943 and 1945. In his spare time he photographed bomb damage, local landscapes, air force life and the local population.

His photographs, which include aerial views of bomb-damaged German cities, the bridge at Remagen and Dachau concentration camp, were gifted to NCAP in 2012 by his daughter Beth Shirk.

10 June 2015

This might be of interest

Date: 01 January 1970
Location: Lake Constance; Tübingen; Germany
Description: Unlocatable
Latécoère 298 seaplane
Photograph taken between 07 and 12 May 1945

I noticed a lot more UK ones had been added earlier this week but only found a few village shots. This expalins that oddity as the additions weren't advertised at that point. The number of frames often creeps up when you go into the opening map view but you don't know where there are.

Another site that may prove useful in the coming years is CUCAP (Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography). I have been watching it for a few years as it is supposed to be adding thumbnail for each aerial photo and recently I noticed that some now have them added. If you go to "BROWSE THE CATALOGUE" you get a map view and dots to indicate photo coverage, blue for obliques and brown for vertical and by ticking the box above the map window on the right it will only show frames that currently have pictures attached.

I should point out a couple of things:

1. The photos are very much orientated to archaeology and coverage of aviation sites is incidental.
2. Once you click on the link in the thumbnail you can only get a slightly larger view but it may show whether the frame shows anything of interest or not.

If there are frames of interest these can be ordered, I believe, via email or phone(?) quoting the reference number. I enquired a couple of years back and I think they were quite pricey but with the thumbnails at least you know what you are getting.

So far I have used it to confirm that some features were still present at the date of the photograph and also that some were removed by the photo date as well. Coverage of viewable frames is limited but even if all frames were viewable large areas of interest have no coverage at all.

I take it the ones of Scotland are not the RCAHMS ones, hard to tell with so many images not being online but the ones I saw did look different from the ones I have seen previously.

I don't know for certain but I suspect this is a unique collection. A lot of the obliques do show partial wings and many these have RAF roundels on them. Either they were flown on request by RAF units or the photographers used ex-RAF aircraft.