Ancient Web: Lionel Smith Kept Fleet Air Arm Memories With Names and Photographs

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

A photograph of an aircraft maintenance crew tells you what everyone looked like. Someone who was there can sometimes tell you who everyone actually was.

Visit Lionel A. Smith's homepage.

Smith's old-style personal site identifies him as a former desktop-publishing instructor, dates a homepage update to April 2007, and mixes nature photography with Fleet Air Arm and military aviation material. The homepage even describes the lens-and-converter combination used to photograph the moon in December 2005. Specifications and personal asides share the same page.

Its richest historical material concerns British naval aircraft and the people who worked on them.

Putting names back into the picture

The 1969 Phantom F4K air-race page shows a maintenance team standing with aircraft XT858 after a transatlantic attempt. Smith lists people in the front and back rows, then thanks correspondents who supplied missing names or corrected them. The page records the June 11, 1969 flight and gives a runway-to-runway time of 4 hours, 46 minutes, and 57 seconds. Those performance details are the site's account, not measurements newly verified here.

Another photograph shows a British Phantom being launched from USS Saratoga later that year. Smith uses it to discuss carrier jet-blast deflectors and adds a first-person memory of a Sea Vixen, a Buccaneer, and the considerable unpleasantness of being near aircraft exhaust.

The Airey Fairey Issue 15 page preserves Fleet Air Arm Association material from 2005–06. Its photographs and captions describe World War I veteran Henry Allingham being made an honorary member and later celebrating his 110th birthday.

This is not an exhaustive military archive or an official institutional history. It is a mixture of personal witness, collected photographs, association records, and corrections sent by people who recognized faces. That last part is the reason to preserve it: when veterans identify colleagues in an old image, a caption can acquire information that would otherwise disappear.

Read the annotated Phantom photographs and the association scrapbook.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.