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Overview
This board game, titled 'Aerial Derby: The Game of the Day', invites players to race aircraft to cities all over the world. Prior to the First World War aviators in Europe and the United States used air races as a means of developing and testing airplanes, and this game, manufactured in England, materialises the considerable public excitement generated by those competitions.
New Zealand newspapers reported on early air races races, and here, as elsewhere, pioneer aviators experimented with potential designs for new aircraft. Between 1902 and 1904 South Island farmer Richard Pearse achieved ‘long hops’ in his flying machine, but the first sustained, controlled flight in New Zealand is credited to Vivian Walsh, who flew an imported biplane at Papakura in 1911,
Wellington is included on the board, suggesting that the makers of the game believed aviation could one day link all of the cities of the world, no matter how distant. This was still some years away, but came a step closer in 1928 when Charles Kingsford Smith made the first successful flight from Australia to New Zealand.
References
- Aimer, Peter. 2006. Aviation. Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand. http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/aviation
- Berliner, Don. 2010. The Big Race of 1910. Air and Space Magazine (January). https://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/the-big-race-of-1910-9075126/
- Kingdon, Raymond William. 2017. Air Racing. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/sports/air-racing