Will the digital age render us invisible to our granchildren?

Before writing The Big Hop: The North Atlantic Air Race, I needed to conduct a great deal of research on aviators of the 1920s, '30s, and '40s. To some degree, this meant acquiring copies of primary documents, but mostly I delved into newspaper records. Where possible, I cross-referenced - checking accounts of the same events but from the perspective of two or more newspapers.

One of the surprises that emerged from this research was in fact how much "new" material I was able to recover; I frequently stumbled across hitherto unknown (to me) pilots, many of whom appeared to have been overlooked by previous historians. But records of their achievements and failures could be found, if someone looked hard enough, because a newspaper - often the New York Times - made the effort to record them in print.

Today, newspapers are in trouble, so much so that even the New York Times could disappear. So as reporters are laid off and papers shut down their presses, how are future generations supposed to learn about our era? Digital technology is the obvious answer, but unfortunately - as anyone who owns a computer whose hard drive has seized up - this form of record keeping is fragile at best.

In fact, in the course of time, it is a near certainty that the Wikipedias, Googles, Yahoos and all future technology-dependent data storage systems will fail or be destroyed.

Like the mythic (is it?) contintent of Atlantis, we could be all but invisible to future generations.

Chronicle Herald features The Big Hop

I am delighted to report that on Sunday the Halifax Chronicle Herald published an article about my book, The Big Hop: The North Atlantic Air Race. On another, more somber note, the appalling helicopter accident that took 17 lives last week is a grim reminder that the dangers of flying across the harsh north Atlantic have not disappeared, despite dramatic improvements to aircraft safety in the decades since Alcock and Brown first flew across the ocean in 1919.