In 1957, Life photographer Loomis Dean was invited by Sabena to witness the spectacular inauguration of the Belgian airline's new helicopter service to Paris. The whole new fleet of eight S-58 helicopters flew from the central Brussels heliport to Issy-les-Moulineaux in loose formation. Helicopter tickets were rather expensive and publicity in Life magazine was aimed at attracting wealthy American tourists, Sabena's advertisements carrying the slogan See more of Europe.

Starting with S-55s in 1953, Sabena was one of the few traditional airlines to try an inter-city passenger helicopter service. The hope that newer helicopter types would drastically cut the high operating costs did not come true. Also, public tolerance of the noisy choppers around city heliports diminished and Sabena gave up around 1965. At AirHistory we have a nice collection of some 50 photographs relating to Sabena's historic helicopters, often depicting these machines at forgotten city heliports in places such as Brussels, Rotterdam and Cologne.

The story of Photo... will be a returning column in our infrequent newsletters. If you feel there is an interesting story around one of your photos, a tad too long too tell in the photo comment, please do not hesitate to contact us through the Contact page on the website! This may be just an interesting little bit of aviation history, or something personal since some of your photos were taken in rather interesting circumstances.

Aircraft Type categories include photos of particular kinds of aircraft, such as Rotorcraft, Seaplanes, Gliders, and Airships. You can also perform aircraft category searches for Aerial Firefighters or Aerial Tankers if you have a more specialized interest. For military aviation aficionados, we offer separate categories for Fighters and Bombers. The newest category is the Electric-Powered category. Although there are limited numbers of electric-powered aeroplanes now flying, we are proud to be able to offer our viewers a sample of cutting-edge aviation and look forward to adding new types to the category in the years to come.

In the last decades, commercial aviation enthusiasts have suffered through a notable reduction in diversity and complexity of airline liveries, with many airlines transitioning to so-called ‘Eurowhite’ liveries. Fortunately, a few airlines have bucked this trend by designing a variety of special tail designs. The most famous, or infamous example was British Airways’ ‘Utopia’ collection of ‘World Tail’ designs. BA have long reverted to a standardized brand image. Some airlines, like JetBlue and Air Austral, however, still carry varied tail designs on their aircraft today.

The BA World tail designs were assigned specific names that were almost always marked on the noses of the aircraft. You may have noted that at AirHistory, we now list these design names, such as Chelsea Rose or Waves of the City, in the Aircraft Name field in the database even though it might be argued they are not individual aircraft names, having been worn by multiple aircraft at the same time.

We think this is neat though as, when you click, for instance, on the design name Mountain of the Birds / Benyhone, you can see all the different aircraft that British Airways painted with that particular design. In this case, we have 85 photos that include images of Boeing 737s, 747s, 757s, 767s and 777s; ATPs, ATR72s, A320s, BAe 146s, Dash 8s, ERJ-145s, Saab 340s, Short 360s, and BN-2 Islanders; and even a 727 that was operated by BA franchise partner Comair in South Africa.

It is also just practical to make no distinction between a tail design name and an individual aircraft name illustrated on the tail, such as Frontier Airline’s wild animals, and Norwegian’s famous people.

If there is no name on an aircraft with a special tail design, the Aircraft Name field is to be left empty, even if the design is known by a name among enthousiasts. It is quite simple really – it all comes down to whether a tail art, livery or individual aircraft name can be read somewhere on the plane. If there is no name on the plane, as is the case with Air Austral and used to be the case with Frontier, then an uploader can choose to mention the tail art in the Photo Comment field. JetBlue and Mexicana also did not provide names for the special tail designs on their aircraft – but nearly all their aircraft did carry a ‘regular’ individual aircraft name, which should be listed in the Aircraft Name field at AirHistory.  

We don't consider an alliance an airline's own product and indeed, we would like to remind uploaders that the Promotional Titles field is not for an airline's various own services and slogans that may be painted on a plane, but only for advertisements for other companies and entities such as as events or tourist regions. It should be prominent displays, too. This is a bit arbitrary of course, but a small sticker certainly does not qualify.