Gordon Swanborough

This is second book on FW190 I read this year. While previous one (Focke Wulf by Alfred Price) was more of a story driven work that nevertheless provided a lot of details, this one is very very heavy on the details and can be a dry read at some points (so many minor, major releases of this fighter are in play at one time you would need side-notes to keep track).

That being said there are some very beautiful cross-section-spreads of the most attractive FW190 versions and plethora of pretty show more good photographs and details (especially master detail shots of captured aircraft that were heavily tested by US and UK).

While I have a feeling that this entire admiration for German weapons and way of war is truly embarrassing for everyone from the Allied side, no matter how good military systems were, and this book is guilty of it as is about any other book on this subject, authors managed to strike balance with pretty straight-forward and blunt representation of the FW190 casualties as war moved to the conclusion. I also like how FW190 was not presented as the ultimate machine - it was always used hand in hand with the other high performing fighters like Bf109G/K.

FW190 was a truly great piece of machinery but, as history shows us over and over again, advanced technology means nothing if there is no human experience to use it. And this is what happened here - with high attrition old and experienced pilots were lost and noobs just could not keep up with the opposition that gained more and more experience and also started to outnumber the German fighters as time went by. This started to bring casualty rates so high that lots of squadrons were just withered down to few machines. And no smart design or improvement can make fighter plane fight without the pilot with cunning and experience.

Last chapter is excerpt from the report UK team wrote after analyzing the first captured aircraft. Wonderful level of details.

For all fans of combat aircraft and combat aircraft history, highly recommended. show less

For many years, William Green and Gordon Swanborough formed a writing team that produced voluminous, detailed, factual writing about aircraft. Their material was ubiquitous and comprehensive. This volume is from a series called "World War 2 Aircraft Fact Files" produced by Macdonald & Janes in the 1970s. It details all the significant - and some of the more obscure - aircraft of the day, as prescribed by the title. This volume covers the products of the Bell and Curtiss companies. There are show more detailed development and production histories, and a slightly broader account of each type's service record.

Before Wikipedia, this book and many others like it were the go-to source for any historical information on warplanes of the era. Colour is restricted to a two-page spread of representative profiles, but there are plenty of acceptable photographs and a number of three-views and some detailed cutaways. This book and its shelf-mates are never going to be classics of aviation literature - indeed, they do make rather dry reading - but they are comprehensive and worth acquiring if you ever see any. show less

Nostalgia - Opening this book immediately took me back to the very early 1970's, when I bought my first copy (number 3?) of the new Air Enthusiast magazine. It was on a pleasant, warm, August day that I happened to be with my new wife and we happened to be passing a bookstore's magazine stand at the Golf Mill shopping mall in Niles(?), IL....

This is similar to the Air Enthusiast Quarterly magazine of the mid 1970's. It celebrates the Indian Golden Jubilee 1932-1982. It is awesome to have a show more 'magazine' that has such advertisements:

Dornier 228 - The next Generation Light Transport Aircraft
Rolls-Royce - for its aero engine, not its cars
British Aerospace - no thank you, I'm not in the market for a Sea Skua anti-shipping missile at the moment, but maybe next month
Mahindra and Mahindra - my company just started doing business with them when I was retiring
Etc.

I counted 11 cutaway drawings. There are numerous colored profiles (4 pages worth). The photographs are high quality, as is the writing. It even has a few cartoons and jokes.

Side note - During World War II my father flew as a radio operator on C-87 transport aircraft (and C-46, C-47, C-54, C-107, B-24, ?), flying over the Himalaya mountains (The Hump). India, aviation and the military have always been special to me. show less

When German forces initiated the assault on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 the Luftwaffe enjoyed almost total supremacy. The fighter element of the Soviet Air Force was immersed in a major re-equipment programme resulting from belated appreciation of the fact that its aircraft had fallen woefully behind world standard. This first part of a two-part Fact File - devoted to all types of indigenous fighters operated by or developed to experimental status for the Soviet Air Forces - is show more primarily concerned with the products of the design bureaux led by Lavochkin and the partnership of Mikoyan and Gurevich, whose fighters, when first opposed by the Luftwaffe, enjoyed indifferent success. Whereas the Mikoyan-Gurevich team largely concentrated its wartime efforts on creating specialised high-altitude fighters which were to receive low development priority owing to more pressing needs, Lavochkin was to overcome early setbacks and achieve outstanding success by the continuous refinement of one basic design; a process epitimized by the La-7 which played a major role in the closing stages of the conflict. show less