Issue 4/75 " ..How many times have we all heard the statement "I'm only interested in " (fill in your own peculiar subject)? A quick look through any Air-Britain questionnaire brings to light members dedicated to a wide variety of highly-specialised subjects. Some even apologise for not having a highly-specialised interest! In the field of aviation history, one salient fact emerges. As time goes by, few people keep to their original narrow subject to the exclusion of everything else. Someone with no interest in World War One aviation can become intrigued by the background to those far-off days. Usually such lack of interest is due to the general feeling that the Royal Flying Corps and its contemporaries were amateurish organisations flying whatever aircraft they could lay hands on, as and when they could get into the air - a sort of "limp-handkerchief" technology (if it moves it's too windy to fly). When one looks closer at the RFC (and later the RAF) in World War One, the organisation required to maintain a very large air force in action is strikingly similar to that set up in World War Two. There were operational training units, flying training schools, specialised maritime, fighter and bomber schools and flying instructors schools. In the UK, there were coastal reconnaissance and defensive fighter squadrons as in World War Two and by the Armistice there was a sizeable equivalent of Bomber Command being organised at British bases. All these required a large number of aircraft and airfields and a major organisation in the shape of factories, acceptance and repair units and construction teams. Although airfield construction was not as elaborate as in World War Two, due to the lack of concrete runways and dispersals, many stations were of permanent character and a fair number of buildings of that era still exist to this day. Once one has accepted that the current organisation of an air force goes back sixty years, then one's interest tends to become retrospective. The theory has been put forward that such interest in the past is a result of nostalgia for remembrances of one's youth - which makes your editors very youthful-looking 80-year-olds. It is this potential change in interests which governs publications like AM. One does not throw away the parts which are not of immediate interest. One files them and in ten years time perhaps they become the basis for a new interest. We would like to think that some of the odder items may have started a few members off into pastures new. One of the fascinations of aviation history is that there are so many facets to a single subject which have all been concentrated into one lifetime. As aviation does not operate in a historical (or geographical) vacuum, interest can stray to other fields - military and naval history, for example. Unfortunately, we tend to lose people that way. Nevertheless, the diversions can add immeasurably not only to one's hobby but to the understanding of the background to recent history. So the moral is - keep your paperwork filed away, you never know when you may want it. And to those who want to know how one keeps track of it all for thirty years, please don't write to us as we have never found out. However, why should we always have to file paper? The next twenty years might see a revolution in information storage and distribution. After all, the Egyptians were using paper three thousand years ago so it is time someone thought of something different. They have. It's called microfilm..."
