The Flight Line — Personalised Aviation Gifts
The Aviation Gift Co.

Stage 3 of 4

The gift

Who it is for, and what actually lands. One page per recipient, each making only the argument that is its own.

Aviation is an unusually easy thing to buy badly for. The shelves are full of generic aeroplane merchandise, and anybody keen enough to be worth buying for already owns several pieces of it. These pages start from the person instead. A student pilot, somebody who has flown the same fleet for fifteen years, a spotter with a drive full of departures and a dad who simply looks up: they want different things, and saying so is more useful than another list.

The reading, in order

No photograph to work from?

What these pages keep concluding

Read them all and the conclusion keeps arriving from different directions. What gets kept is the gift that is about this person and this aircraft, not about aviation in general. Sometimes that runs through a photograph they took themselves. Where there is no photograph, it runs through a place instead, which is why the airport code turns up on so many of these pages.

And after that

The stage that follows this one is on the wall: Paper, frame, canvas, metal or a mug. What each format physically is, and which one suits the picture you have.

Written by Craig Fearn, The Aviation Gift Co.