James McDonnell/McDonnell Aircraft Corporation, undated

Robert E. Williams was an aviation illustrator who worked for Douglas Aircraft and was the managing editor of the American Aviation Historical Society Journal for many years. The majority of the collection is composed of photographs of a wide-variety of aircraft, with the largest number being Douglas aircraft.

Series I, Photographs, contains a wide-range of photographs of various aircraft including aircraft produced by Douglas, McDonnell, North American, Bell, and many others. The photographs are generally grouped according to manufacturer and by type of aircraft, i.e. fighters, bombers, etc. and are not necessarily in alphabetical order. The photographs were primarily used to illustrate articles by Mr. Williams in the American Aviation Historical Society Journal (see Series II, Aviation Research). The collection also includes photographs of several prototype aircraft produced by Douglas, including the XB-19, YC-15, XB-42, the original DC-8, and the original DC-4 (later renamed the DC-4E).

Series II, Aviation Research, primarily consists of newspaper and magazine articles Mr. Williams obtained while researching a particular airplane or topic. Some files contain drawings and a few contain articles written by Mr. Williams. The files are identified by topic, but are not grouped by topic or by aircraft and are not in alphabetical or date order. The order of the files was established by Mr. Williams and generally follow his research interests. The order of the files in this series generally match the order of the files in Series I, Photographs.