Announcement: Aerostation, the newsletter, then Journal of the Association of Balloon and Airship Constructors (ABAC)

Volume 1 (1974): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BXMTJSDH
Volume 2 (1975): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C1HZYR8C
Volume 3 (1976): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C2RM94CH
Volume 4 (1977): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CHL9TDZL
Volume 5 (1978): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C9S8SL2Y
Volume 6 (1979): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CJRQNCYN
Volume 7 (1980): https://www.lulu.com/shop/george-wright-and-marc-de-piolenc/aerostation-volume-7-1980/paperback/product-v8rmprg.html
Volume 8 (1981): https://www.lulu.com/shop/george-wright-and-marc-de-piolenc/aerostation-volume-8-1981/paperback/product-q6ywgw5.html
Volume 9 (1982): https://www.lulu.com/shop/george-wright-and-marc-de-piolenc/aerostation-volume-9-1982/paperback/product-gjn7vz7.html
Volume 10 (1983): https://www.lulu.com/shop/george-e-wright-and-marc-de-piolenc/aerostation-volume-10-1984/paperback/product-m2242y6.html
Index: https://airshiphistory.com/wp/the-lta-index/

ABAC was founded in southern California, originally as a special interest group within the Experimental Aircraft Association. The founder and charter members intended for the Association to focus on the technological and engineering aspects of lighter-than-air (LTA) flight. Technical information was to be made available through Aerostation, through Technical Notes, through the Association’s library of technical documents and through periodic conferences.

Buoyed by the presence of capable volunteer LTA enthusiasts, by the roughly decennial revival of interest in LTA worldwide, by southern California being a center for aviation and by the fact that many eminent names from the heroic period of airship development were still alive, and willing to help, ABAC’s membership and Aerostation’s subscription base expanded rapidly, to the point that the Association experimented with bimonthly publication in 1976. In its early years, Aerostation documented many projects that will not show up in the aviation literature - privately funded projects that succeeded or failed quietly. The early years also brought in the core of the Association’s technical library. Many old US Navy “poopie baggers” (airshipmen) had retained copies of manuals for the airship types that they had flown (in defiance of regulations), while others had technical documents that had since disappeared from their official archives. They donated these to the association, with the result that ABAC sold photocopies of Navy documents to the US Navy when these proved impossible to retrieve from government archives.

As time passed, interest in lighter-than-air flight became more diffuse. The association’s technical document collection filled many orders (some of them even from the organizations that had produced the documents in the first place), while contributors to the Journal became fewer and more widespread geographically. Then, too, the eager volunteers diminished in number to four, three, two and finally the undersigned.

As of 1996, Aerostation began combined publication with a New Zealand based magazine called Gasbag (later Airshipworld).

Aerostation ceased publication with Volume 26, Number 4, December 2003, leaving 26 volumes that need to be re-published to make them available again to technical libraries and to individual researchers. The first three volumes are out, and the rest will follow. Most of the rest are scanned, though some missing issues are being obtained as loans from private collections.

An index of Aerostation has been prepared by Kent O’Grady, and is included in The LTA Index published by Atlantis Productions, which also indexes five other LTA publications.