2016 Royal Aeronautical Society 50th Anniversary (Isle of Man)
The Royal Aeronautical Society, founded in January 1866 under the name of the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain, celebrated its 150th anniversary in January 2016, and the Isle of Man Post Office marked the occasion with a set of eight stamps. Two of them depicted astronautical subjects: Yuri Gagarin in his spacesuit on the 77p stamp, and the International Space Station on the 124p stamp. At the time of the issue, the British astronaut Tim Peake was in orbit aboard the ISS.
The complete set of eight and their face values were: the first hydrogen balloon flight in Britain, by Vincenzo Lunardi in 1784 (First Class); Sir George Cayley (First Class); a French-built Wright aircraft flying at Reims in 1909 (77p); Gagarin; the Hawker P.1127 V/STOL jet, a forerunner of the Harrier jump jet (93p); a British Airways Concorde (93p); the Rolls Royce Trent 900 turbofan engine as used in the Airbus A380 (124p); the ISS.
Stanley Gibbons nos. (to come)