Originally Posted by
BEagle
Maybe it's because it was deemed OK to show disused aerodromes such as Broadwell and Akeman Street (near Leafield), but not active ones?
Maps of the period often just include the word 'airfield' and that's about all. One step up from 'Here be dragons', I guess?
I wonder whether the PIs had a suitable bunch of anonymous countryside photos which they just snipped into shape and stuck over the actual imagery? The aerial map of Keevil looks rather odd, for example.
In 1964 many airfields were indeed marked simply as BEagle says. As a Nav Rad we used airfields and hangars as aiming points and our bible, IIRC, was SD892. This secret tome was a survey of every airfield in the UK and its extensibility for the new modern jets. It gave the maxium runway extensions together with the infrastructure impact - divert A15 around Scampton - demolish farm house etc. They had surveyed all airfields including the wartime emergency ones.
Then in later 60s we got new ordnance survey maps and the complete airfield details, including SSAs, was printed. We thought at the time that OS had got on to the airfields when they went in to C&M for upgrades.
As the mapping updates was ongoing we still needed SD892. An amendment came out that removed many wartime airfields and would have reduced its value to us if incorporated. Against all the rules we simply filed the amendment and retained the out of date copy.
PIs had a suitable bunch of anonymous countryside photos which they just snipped into shape and stuck over the actual imagery
Two points here. A lot of high definition Cold War imagery of Russia in the 60s had been from German archives. Many were then clearly enhanced with pen and ink etc, ie updated from unattributable sources.
Later JARIC also produced fix point overlays for the TSR2 SLAR. These were masterpieces of modelling. Fabrics, pipe cleaners etc were manipulated and then oblique photographs taken to give as accurate an impression of a SLAR fix-point image. If you think about it, this was the ultimate inflexible navigation aid.