Favorite Aircraft History Books?

[Jukka Juutinen]

Originally Posted by John Vasco

Jukka,
Interesting comment. What exactly do aircraft book authors have to learn from naval authors? I would be interested to know what aircraft authors are missing/omitting from what they set down.

Regards,

John Vasco

Well, I have a few recommendations. First, try to get a look at "Japanese Cruisers of the Pacific War". I admit, neither of the two authors are naval architects. Anyway, this book has everything, design background, tech details and operational use. Tech details include stuff like engine room fan capacity, material specs etc. Performance data is based on trial data, not gossip (they include date of trials, exact displacement of the ship etc). Be warned, this book is a large formattome with some 900 pages.

Second recommendation is the Anatomy of the Ship series. Pick e.g. John Roberts´ volume on the HMS Dreadnought. In this book, you can find some 30 pages of machinery related drawings (from general mach room layout to sectioned drawings of pumps) alone.

You wrote that the pilots didn´t give much thought to the tech stuff. Well, how much were they interested in the exact tone of their green paint or whether the swastika was 625 mm or 620 mm wide? Yet, books about that subject fill the shelves (I include pictorials here if the captions´ main theme is camo and markings).

After checking these two, you cannot resist agreeing with me that aviation authors have extremely lot to learn from their naval colleagues.