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Concorde, the Big Racer, idles out to Heathrow's runway 27L for another Mach 2 dash across the Atlantic. Living this mission from the cockpit was undoubtedly your editor's most memorable aviation experience these past 17 years. (Dave Fraser)
AA Makes A Happy Hundred
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Aa Makes A Happy Hundredth
Welcome to the one hundredth edition of Australian Aviation. It was almost exactly seventeen years ago that issue number one then named the Australian Aviation & Defence Review, went on sale. In those seventeen years Jim Thorn, AA’s founder and managing editor, has seen a lot of change, both for good and bad, occur in all levels of aviation both here and abroad. In the following pages Jim candidly recounts some of the more interesting aspects of this period and reflects upon the major events of recent years.
It seems so long ago now. That night back in 1976 when sleep seemed a distant companion and the concept of an aviation annual first came to me. They say that’s the way most people get ideas and who am I to argue, though like all worthwhile projects I soon realised that the real work had only just begun. History fortunately now records that Australian Aviation & Defence Review did indeed find a solid niche in the marketplace offering an attempt at a balanced commentary on military, airline and general aviation matters of the time. At first though it was conceived largely as an extended hobby and something relatively easily accomplished as yours truly was already well entrenched in the magazine publishing industry. How wrong could I have been! AADR 01 actually turned a very modest profit; it was the next two dozen issues that didn’t make a profit that became a problem! However, buoyed on by the sales success of AADR as an annual it was decided in 1979 that it should go quarterly to again fill a niche in the marketplace that wasn’t being addressed. And while the product worked as advertised the error came in overprinting due largely to the enormous time span that passes between a magazine hitting the streets and the finalised sales returns being available to actually tell you how it performed. By the time you have hard data on issue one you already have issue four on the presses, that sort of thing. Getting hot copy was easy though.
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