Declining quality of British aviation magazines

[Jukka Juutinen]

The problem is not solely limited to contents, the problem is also one of design. Both Aeroplane and FlyPast are designed like some pop music rags for teeners with their ragged-right design looking like a mixture of vomit and diarrhoea (I occasionally read two Finnish rock/metal music magazines and even they are far less eye candish than Aeroplane or Flypast or the British classical music magazine Gramophone suggesting that there is perhaps syphilis at work in British publishing industry). A side-by-side comparison of those two to either After the Battle or Batailles Aeriennes (or Air Enthusiast or Aeroplane Monthly in their prime) is shocking. Air Enthusiast articles, on average, devoted 70 - 80 % of space to textual information, the rest to illustrations. Today's Aeroplane (and FlyPast and too often the The Aviation Historian as well) has the proportions reversed suggesting that the English avmag readers have regressed back into to the caveman age.

Another issue is the length of articles. 2 - 4 pages seem to be the norm for FlyPast and Aeroplane. For comparison, Shlomo Aloni's article on Israeli Mossies in AE 83 runs for 22 pages.

Why not simply publish an English edition of Batailles Aeriennes?