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PostPosted: 16 Aug 2011, 22:03 
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For those serious about the SAAF history & who have bandwidth to burn ... the National Archives in the UK, have recently released these for download.

Quote:
AIR 54 - South Africa Air Force: Operations Record Books
Microfilm copies of operations record books of various operational and administrative units.

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documentsonline/digital-microfilm.asp

There are 205 catalogs with around 2-3 pdf files per catalog, this includes sortie reports, squadron war diaries, administrative reports etc ... beware ... each file is around 250mb in size. I've downloaded 80% of them so far & over 80gb's worth :D

A sample of the content .. some of the carbon copies are extremely difficult to read though .. not to mention trying to decipher some of the handwriting .. :lol:

It is AWESOME stuff though \:D/ \:D/

Image

Image

Cheers

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PostPosted: 17 Aug 2011, 11:08 
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:D :D :D :D :D :D \:D/ \:D/ \:D/ \:D/ :smt023 :smt023 :mrgreen: :mrgreen:

Feel like I have just won the lotto, as I was going to go down to Kew to view these files, but now can relax at home with coffee etc.

Much easier to read once printed on to paper, the poor printer is being worked over time.


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PostPosted: 17 Aug 2011, 13:31 
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:D What have we let ourselves in for here :D. The main beneficiaries of this will be the sellers of printer cartridges .... :lol:

Thanks for making us aware of this facility Kremlin =D> :smt023

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PostPosted: 17 Aug 2011, 15:04 
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:) Luckily my lazer printer can do 10,000 pages per cartridge, so it should manage on less than one cartridge, if not [-o< another £40 for a second cartridge will be required.


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PostPosted: 17 Aug 2011, 17:28 
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W407594F wrote:
Feel like I have just won the lotto ...
When I first saw these, I thought you & Spice would really enjoy them :D

Tally-ho wrote:
Thanks for making us aware of this facility Kremlin ..
Pleasure Tally-ho, this is just so awesome, that it must be shared :smt023

I'm busy tying up sortie reports to some of my profile drawings ... but there is just so much information here. ie A pilot's actual sortie report can be cross-linked to the squadrons war diary, then also found in the actual wings war diary .. \:D/ \:D/

If one is hunting for specific info,I recomend downloading N°205 first .. this is the master catalog list. Seeing as some of the catalogs actually contain much more than what is listed only in the catalog title.

Cheers

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PostPosted: 25 Aug 2011, 10:54 
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Hey W40 .. you need to come up for air ... :shock:

I have visions of you surrounded by a sea of printed reports ... :lol: :lol:

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PostPosted: 25 Aug 2011, 11:04 
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You are not far wrong :lol:

Geez, it is a mine of information and some aircraft incidents are explained in detail, clarifying some glaring errors

ie one Wellington everyone reported as missing, it had said it was coming in to land at 02:00 and it over shot due to weather conditions. On climbing hit a 70ft high tree and due to the weather it was not seen but it was just 3km from the end of the runway burnt out. Reported overdue until 05:30 when it could be seen clearly from the airfield as the weather had cleared.

The OC was mad and stipulated they should have been informed of the bad weather or made use of their parachutes, he had when his Wellington got lost due to faulty navigational information.


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PostPosted: 26 Aug 2011, 12:44 
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Given the extortionate prices charged for interwebs service in .za maybe it would be cheaper to have one of our expatriate members put the whole lot on an external hard drive and send it here by parcel post.
How many GB for the whole lot?

The SAAF Shop could make a few pennies by supplying individual files on DVD or CD. How about that Dean?


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PostPosted: 26 Aug 2011, 12:53 
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This whole down load is huge, I am managing roughly two pages (28 files) of it a day.

There is 21 pages and each pages has approximately 14 files of approx 250MB each.

Some files once down loaded are 300 pages of print off

Luckily my fiber optic connection for my broad band and TV, only costs flat rate £22.00 a month and I have no band width limit :D The telephone connection runs on poles still but the fiber optic runs under the pavement.


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PostPosted: 26 Aug 2011, 13:04 
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A quick thumbsuck calculation gets about 75 gigabytes for the whole lot, if your estimate of the average file size and number is accurate.


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PostPosted: 26 Aug 2011, 13:08 
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When I have finished I will let you know, Kremlin more than likely knows the full down load amount as he started ages ago.

The files need alot of tweeking as some have more than one Air Station or Squadron them and then they are not in PDF format but micro flim that has to be converted to PDF format or just print off which I am doing as I do not have the PDF convert program or access to it


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PostPosted: 26 Aug 2011, 13:50 
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I have downloaded the lot & have a total of 498 pdf files amounting to 96 Gb :D

That's around 20+ DVD's worth or around 135+ CD's :roll:

Viva for having an uncapped connection =D> I've still got smoke coming from my internet cables :lol: :lol: :lol:

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PostPosted: 26 Aug 2011, 14:05 
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:shock: 96 GB

So far I have put in all on an external Hard Drive, which luckily is 298 GB in size, so will fit it all.

It down loads in pdf but is in image form, which can not be played with.


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PostPosted: 26 Aug 2011, 14:25 
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W407594F wrote:
It down loads in pdf but is in image form, which can not be played with.
Correct .. it is basically a lot of images, which have been packaged into a pdf. I use Adobe Acrobat which allows me to extract & save the contents into separate files.

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PostPosted: 23 Dec 2011, 00:42 
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What an awesome treasure trove of information! I wish the SA government would be as open and accommodating with its old archives.

As a long-term thing, who's open to the possibility of setting up a collaborative project to go through all of these and enter the details into a searchable online web app made for the task? With enough people it shouldn't take all that long and with multiple eyes on the trickier docs we may be able to decipher the hard-to-read stuff.


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