For the aviation enthusiast and avid eBook reader, the fusion of these two resources together can be found at the Flightglobal Archives.  Located at http://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/index.html, this online PDF archive of the many years of back issues and additional resources is easy to search, easy to use and in many cases, downloadable to your reading device of choice.

With large page sizes and graphical images, aviation history, at least from my past usage, is not commonly associated with easy reading on any electronic device.  However, Flightglobal has a done an excellent job with the archives in bringing these back issues and other resources into the modern era.  Back issues of their magazine span the years 1909 through 2005 and can be searched either via year or keyword.

Choosing the search option, the user can use phrase or single word searching or even just browse via year if they have a general idea of the time period they are looking for.  Results are returned with both a bit of the article and a thumbnail of the page in question.

Selecting an individual result then launches the PDF viewer so that you can read the article.  Gathered together in groupings, each page is a single PDF file and can be downloaded on an individual basis.  The scans were highly detailed and very legible.  PDF’s are searchable to some extent, as I found several keywords on my topic of choice.

From an eReading standpoint, this is a great resource for you to consider albeit with some cautions.  The website itself uses some sort of Flash-based component for searching and viewing the individual results.  While this is not bad, it can be troublesome when using an eReader such as the iPad or non-Flash supported device.  Using my desktop PC, I was easily able to transfer the PDF files to my reading devices.

Other resources on the site include suggested topics, images, aircraft cutaways and a host of information for the aviation enthusiast.  Is it perfect?  No, but taking into account the amount of history and data that can be searched and used, it’s a good place to find some great reading material for your eReader!

Links:

The main link and the source for the images in this post can be found here.  More information on Flightglobal can be found here.

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