Cutaway drawings of planes, trains, automobiles and ships

I am doing research for an article about the Internet of things. A NASA Tech Brief article led me to a blog post with 20 different cutaway drawings. Yeah, it’s a year old and maybe all you hotshots read Gizmodo, but us analog dinosaurs aren’t as hip. I have always loved cutaways ever since I was an auto engineer. Some might dismiss it as simple technical illustration, but I see them as fine art.

The Gee Bee Model R Super Sportster made by Granville Brothers Aircraft of Springfield, Massachusetts in 1932.

Looking up one of the cutaway drawings to get permission to print it, I came across the mother lode of airplane cutaway drawings. Flightglobal is a trade paper like EDN or Machine Design. It is owned by Reed Business Information, the outfit that used to own EDN magazine. I had a wistful feeling seeing this magazine still at Reed Business. They got the whole Internet thing a decade before most companies. And they sure understood SEO (search engineer optimization). I could mention a buddy’s name in an EDN blog, and by that night he was getting calls from old High School buddies that saw his name in the post.

Oh, and in the hopes the fine folks over at Reed Business are longer on Marketing than on lawyers, this is cutaway of the Global Hawk (aka un-weaponized Predator drone).

The Global Hawk is cutaway by FlightGlobal magazine.