ABSTRACT
This chapters follows various air panics, from the phantom airship panic of 1913 to the Blitz in 1940, to examine the origin and evolution of the publics fear of aerial bombardment. It was during the Edwardian period that flight first burst into the publics consciousness. A heavier-than-air machine first flew over British soil in October 1908; the English Channel was bridged by air in June 1909; the first flight from London to Manchester was in July 1910. Although air panics were usually triggered by a specific event, such as the passage of a mysterious airship over a naval base or a revelation about the strength of foreign air forces. Press alarms about the state of Britains defences were recurrent phenomena during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with air panics replacing traditional invasion panics from around the time of the First World War.
