Air 78

[Andy Ingham]

I have downloaded a selection of AIR78 files from the Documents online section of the NA website.
FYI this service is free but the files are very large.
Does anyone know why some entries are marked with the letter 'F' and some with the letters N.S.A.
Thanks

[dennis_burke]

Nevermind, found them! Might answer some questions!!

[alclark]

I have downloaded a few GB worth of them on to my external hard-drive.

The N.S.A. ones are National Service, not sure about F.

They are good for answering questions about some aircrew who survived crashes and were never commissioned. The only problem is common names are near enough impossible to resolve because of the numbers of them, AIR 78 covers nearly 60 years.

When I was downloading some of them I wondered if enough people got together whether it would be possible to transcribe the records into a form that wasn't so memory hungry. After all you only get 8 entires per page (with 3 lines per entry) and 1,200 pages for your 250 - 300Mb.

[NiallC]

Hi

I was a bit surprised when I downloaded a few files from AIR78 a couple of weeks back. The description of the class had always led me to believe that it was essentially an index to the service records held elsewhere in AIR7x i.e. pre 1928 only.
Instead it is clearly an index to a much larger group of records - including those still held by the MOD. Some records have dates of birth as late as the mid-1950s and one WRAF record shows a marriage in 1976 so the cut-off date was clearly later than that.

It was 10 seconds work to identify a 1942-45 fighter pilot whose full names had eluded me for years.

I've no idea what the "F" stamp means. At first I thought "Flying", but there are many pilots and aircrew whose records don't show it. Could NSA be something to do with National Service? And what does the stamp "MILITIA" mean?

Niall

[alclark]

The personnel with Militia seem to be pre-war RAuxAF and RAFVR, so I'd say it was referring to them being reservists, why it does say Aux AF & VR I don't know.

[JohnE]

Where do I go on the NA website to find these downloads?

John

[Mikkel Plannthin]

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documentsonline/search-results.asp?searchtype=browserefine&query=scope%3d%22name%20range%22&catid=32&pagenumber=1&querytype=1&mediaarray=*

Mikkel

[pete102]

I wasn't aware of this, thanks for the info.

As for the abbreviations, does anyone know what G.A. means?

Pete

[Mikkel Plannthin]

are we all downloading from AIR 78 right now, or is the service very very slow and unstable?

Mikkel

[Andy Ingham]

I think the service is slow, mind the files are very large.
Andy

[alclark]

Last month it was seemingly taking forever to download. My connection at best is 2 M bits per sec (or 250Kb per second when put into a unit which means a little more to most people) which for a 300 Mb file works at 20 minutes, even if it manages to sustain that download speed which it rarely does. 40 minutes can be the norm.

I wonder if it would be quicker to go down to Kew with a portable hard drive and copy the lot off their network than wait for it to download via the net?

[paulmcmillan]

Thanks for the link does anyone know what PD means ?

[dennis_burke]

This is where Irish Army officers writting, hearing and transcription skills come in for scrutiny!! Found six of our missing men from Irish incidents so far, four fails also. Interesting source!!!

Can you imagine being the person(s) setting up each of those 8 sheet images, photographing it, 8 more sheets, photo, 8 more sheets, .......... shudder.