Product Description

This title details every aircraft type that saw action in World War I. It encompasses a story of courage and technical innovation, focusing on some of the characters of the war and providing an overall account of allied aviation.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #139572 in Books
• Published on: 2000-11-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 96 pages

Customer Reviews

lots of pictures, good text on planes and people from WW1
This is Hugh Cowin's fourth book in the Aviation Pioneers series and is complementary to his book on the aviation of the Central Powers that appeared a year earlier. Like the previous books, this one has an amazing wealth of information in what is, largely, a pictorial format drawn extensively from the author's own library. The personal profiles - of which there are 26 - are little gems of succinct biography outlining the key events in the lives of both famous and lesser-known aces and designers. The book covers both the military and industrial aspects of the air war. Hugh Cowin describes how the authorities were obsessed with aircraft stability in the early stages of the war when the role of aircraft was assumed to be for observation. This attitude changed as the fighting role of aircraft was realised, eventually spawning specialised types for ground attack, air-to-air combat, bombardment and so on. Designers had different approaches to the features for each of these types and this contributes to the rich diversity in the book. Some were more successful than others: the Vickers FB 14 took an appalling 41 minutes to reach 10,000 feet while the Sopwith Camel took not much more than a quarter of the time. As for the industrial aspects, there is scarcely one type for which the production quantity is not given, ranging from the one-off failed prototypes to the 8,472 SPAD XIIIs. Spare a thought as well for those cancelled contracts at the end of the war. Curtiss, for example, saw prospects of building over 7,000 aircraft of different types disappear. Licence and subcontract production was widely adopted in every country including, surprisingly, the USA. Russia and Italy, although lesser known Allied powers, also feature in the book. This provides an opportunity to illustrate the huge Sikorsky and Caproni aircraft those countries built. But your reviewer looked in vain for any reference to a Japanese contribution to the Allied air efforts. There were some amazingly inappropriate names for aircraft models - inappropriate, that is, if one identifies the qualities of the name with purported aviation matters. Consider, for example, the Sopwith Snail, the BAT Baboon, the Blackburn Kangaroo and the Nieuport Bebé. Errors? A few inconsequential typos plus Geoffrey de Havilland in a shabby RAF uniform being described as a captain in the RFC. The book is excellent value...