One of the most important assets on Archive.org is are our digitized newspapers and newsletters from Aerospace corporations.  For many years, we would get research requests asking if we had any information on a realitive that worked at one of the local aerospace corporations, such as Cosolidated/Convair or Ryan.  And although we have quite an extensive of material from those companies, we did not receive anything specific like a list of regular employees and what their role was at the company.  However, since we have digitized these resources, we can just point the researcher to Archive.org, and they can do a name search in the text contents, and there is a very good change that a result including their realitive will be returned.  

Searching inside of the thousands of digitized text pages is very simple, just put in your search term, select "search text contents" and...

Archive.org will do all the work! 

The Ryan Flying Reporter/Ryan Reporter was the employee newspaper for the Ryan Aeronautical Company, and we have digitized editions of it from the early days of World War II through the 1970s.  

One of the first Ryan Flying Reporters printed in the early days of the Second World War.

They early Ryan Flying Reporters were light on text and included many drawings made by Ryan employees.

As the War evolved, so did the ‘Reporter’ as the employees became the focus of most of the articles. 

The later "Ryan Reporters" took some of the focus off the employees and placed it more on the company's products.

As Ryan moved towards the 21st Century, they focused on manufacturing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.  This focus can be seen in later versions of the Company's newsletters, now called the Achiever.

Although the "Achiever" did look at Ryan's products, it still had features on the employees as well.

Ryan operated flight schools prior to and during the Second World War.  These schools would train the pilots who would fight in the conflict, and we have many volumes of "Windsock" the publication devoted to each class of graduating pilots from the schools. 

Consolidated aircraft was founded by Reuben Fleet in Buffalo New York, but moved to San Diego in the mid 1930s.  The company would play a very significant role in aviation in the Second World War, the Cold War and right into the Space Age.  We have employee newsletters that document it all.  The first employee-produced publication was the Consolidator, and was introcduced to the company's employees with this statement taken from the first edition: "With this, the first issue of your magazine, published by and for the employees of CONSOLIDATED AIRCRAFT CORPORATION, the bouncing baby is hereby delivered to its rightful family"

One of the first editions of the "Consolidator". 

The "Consolidator", like all subsequent company publications, focused on employee's extracurricular activities, such as the bowling team.

One very interesting newsletter that Consolidated produced was "Plane Talk," which was written specificcally not for employees, but the pilots and crew of the aircraft they produced, such as at the B-24.

As Condolidated became Convair and then eventually General Dynamics, the newspapers expanded, and focused on different locations and divisions.

Versions of "Convariety" include those from San Diego, Fort Worth and the Astronautics division.

Besides local San Diego companies, we have newspapers from other California aerospace corporations, such as Northrop.

We have both newspapers from Northrop's manucaturing division, and "Nuance" which is a publication of Northrop University, a technical school in Inglewood, CA.

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