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| Kickass leather flight jacket not included. |
Back in the day, pilots were issued escape and evasion maps, printed on silk, so they could be sewn inside a flight jacket, and allow someone shot down to carry the necessary guide in hand, or hidden inside one's clothes.
If you lost your old one, never had one, or just want the option, there's a company called Silk Maps, and the fine folks there will be happy to rectify that lack, for any place in the world, for $50. Any location, you zoom the scale, the measurements will be imperial or metric at your choice, and you can do it in topo, street map, or satellite view.
Recreate the memento you never had of some faraway conflict. Make a map in advance for a trip, and make it a souvenir of an adventure. Or exactly as intended, make yourself a just-in-case map to get out of Dodge, come the zombie apocalypse.
Note these are new made, not retro, nor period accurate for anything but right now. But you can add them to appropriate attire (see flight jacket above), or assemble a collection of them and sew them into anything.
They're 2' square and 100% silk, so you can also use it as a scarf, handkerchief, bandana, or assemble enough to make an entire garment. You're paying for them.
I thought the fact that someone decided these things were worth creating new was notably genius, and the maps are actually quite useful, so I thought you might appreciate them too.
This is how a two-hour wander around the interwebs turns into a useful blog post.
A very nice jacket!
ReplyDeleteThat is cool. Way too warm down here for wearing a leather jacket often enough to have it on my person. I wonder if declination for north for the map can be automatically factored in ?
ReplyDeleteNice. One quibble though. I believe they were silk so as to be water proof. My grandfather saved all of his from the south pacific and the local nuns sewed them into a big quilt. Personally I would have rather kept them as maps but it is a pretty cool looking blanket with amazing handiwork.
ReplyDelete- BAP45
I still have the one my father carried into France on D-Day as a glider pilot.
ReplyDeleteFuckin A! I need one.
ReplyDeleteUncle Bob
These look surprisingly useful.
ReplyDeleteThere were some surplus ones available 15-20 years ago, and I bought a couple. The story was they were made of silk for durability, being water resistant, but also because silk will fold and compress down very very small for a given size of map, making them easier to hide, and the folds were less likely than other materials to weaken or fail on the creases.
ReplyDelete