Clinton H. Groves’ aviation photos

This is going to come as a shock—a SHOCK—to some of you, but I harboured a not insignificant obsession with liners when I was a teenager, both of the ocean and air kind. I loved reading about commercial ships and planes of yore, learning about how they were operated, and contrasting them to how we get around today. Some of my favourite tomes were technical reference manuals and so-called “coffee table” books that explored these incredible machines. You could keep your books on cars and motorbikes, these liners were where it was at. I recall one of my favourites was a photo book on commercial aviation from the 1960s to the early 1990s, the majority of which consisted of scanned slides taken by Clinton H. Groves. His work was meticulous, well framed, and fascinating. I was just as interested in the historical backdrops as I was the planes. Cars whizzing by a parked plane in NYC in the 1960s, the skyline of the late Kai Tak Airport in Hong Kong, people tending to those pencil JT3C…