Fighter Planes (Beginners Plus)

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caption id="attachment_7493" align="alignnone" width="161" caption="Flying for fun has never been as funny."] [/caption] Staring grimly at British rain clouds, maintaining your own aircraft, and the fun of wind-in-your-face flying, Propellerhead captures the essence of popular flying in the UK at the grassroots level. The author, keen to impress girls at the start of the book by ‘becoming a pilot’, decides to take up flying and enters the addictive world of the weekend microlight aviators, with gently humorous results. Highly recommended. Bomber – Len Deighton But this crisp and authoritative book does much more. It includes a mini-history of the birth of aviation, cameos from Charles Rolls and Henry Royce, whose company produced the engine that took the Mustang from good to great, a thorough account of the air war in Europe from 1940 to 1945, and even the essential highlights of the war on the ground. They were fortunate that despite the Air Ministry’s scepticism, their efforts enjoyed determined and far-sighted support from When in late 1938, as the prospect of war loomed over Europe, designer Geoffrey de Havilland first suggested the idea of a lightweight twin-engined bomber that relied on high speed rather than defensive gun turrets to protect itself, the Air Ministry told him: “Forget it.” Had the Second World War in the air been decided on aesthetics alone, the RAF would have beaten the Luftwaffe hands-down. The Spitfire fighter had a deadly elegance that outshone its homelier rival, the Messerschmitt 109. In monumental majesty, the Lancaster dwarfed anything in the enemy’s bomber fleet. And as for the all-rounders in between, there was nothing that the Germans produced that could hold a candle to the marvellous Mosquito.

The Nobel-prize winning nuclear physicist was one of a number of high-value passengers including spies, downed aircrew and even artists on cultural visits who were carried to and from the Swedish capital inside the felt-lined fuselage of the war’s most unlikely airliner. We learn that three years earlier, the young German immigrant Edgar Schmued was working at the fledgling North American Aviation Company when his boss asked him to meet Britain’s urgent need for a new fighter by designing “the fastest airplane you can”, around a 5ft 10 inch, 140lb man.David and Margaret White, a husband and wife team, tell the story of this little plane beautifully, from its gestation in the mind of a German immigrant in California, to the wartime corruption and shortsightedness that delayed the introduction of the Mustang after its successful test flights, to its final triumph in the skies over Europe in 1944 and 1945.

The Albatros was the scourge of the RFC on the Western Front in 1916-17, with pilots of the calibre of von Richthofen, Boelke and Schleich cutting swathes through their opponents. Well over 4000 Albatros scouts were built between 1916 and 1918, and they were also extensively used by the Austro-Hungarians against Russian, Italian and British aircraft until war's end.And, because of its unique wood and glue construction, furniture factories, cabinetmakers and musical instrument manufacturers around Britain were able to put their carpentry-skilled workforces to work helping keep up with demand for de Havilland’s masterpiece.

In 1916 German aerial domination had been lost to the French and British fighters. German fighter pilots requested an aircraft that was more powerful and more heavily armed, and the Albatros design bureau set to work on what was to become an iconic aircraft design. By April 1916, they had developed the Albatros D.I, that featured the usual Albatros semi-monocoque wooden construction with a 160hp Mercedes engine and two forward-firing machine guns. Contents: Introduction - Chronology - Design and development - Strategic situation - Technical specifications - The combatants - Combat - Statistics and analysis - Aftermath - Bibliography - Glossary. Author: That is, until the arrival of the Albatros D II, a sleek inline-engined machine built for speed and with twin-gun firepower. Thus, the later part of 1916 saw an epic struggle in the skies above the Somme pitting the manoeuvrable yet under-gunned DH 2s against the less nimble yet better armed and faster Albatros D IIs. It’s a book full of small, pleasant surprises. Did you know Gustave Eiffel invented the wind tunnel, and was the first to figure out that “lift is the result of air pressure above the wing”, not below it? Or that Royce and Rolls were an upstairs-downstairs team, Royce having grown up “dirt poor” with “only one year of formal education” while Rolls was an Etonian and the son of an aristocrat? targets across occupied Europe that would come to define de Havilland’s Wooden Wonder in the mind of the public.

Spad VII vs Albatros D III - 1917-18

Four months later, 105 Squadron spoiled Herman Göring’s big day in Berlin. Geoffrey de Havilland always maintained that simply being the “right size” was a crucial component of any successful aircraft design. With the Mosquito, he’d judged it to perfection. There were single nights either side of D-Day when Mosquito fighter-bombers would destroy nearly 1,000 separate pieces of German motor transport. Showcases particularly celebrated aircraft - such as the Supermarine Spitfire and Concorde - in beautifully photographed "virtual tour" features There are of course other great books out there. Some of the runner-ups included Battle of Britain, Log of the Liberators and Fall of Fortresses. Our personal favorites were actually the folks who still have their father’s or grandfather’s logbooks, of which there were many. Air Marshal Wilfred Freeman, the man responsible for research, development and production of new aircraft for the RAF.

Albatros fighters reached their zenith of deadly efficiency in the spring of 1917, when the Albatros D III took a heavy toll of Allied aircraft. Nearly every one of the 81 Jagdstaffeln, or fighter squadrons, operated one or more types of highly decorated Albatros aircraft at some point in their history. In the end the Germans would regain air superiority, and hold it into the following summer with the employment of their new Jagdgeschwader (larger fighter groupings), but the FE 2 remained a tenacious foe that inflicted many casualties - some of whom were Germany's best aces (including 'The Red Baron'). Contents: Introduction - Design and Development - Technical Specifications and Variants - Operational History - Conclusion. Author:Modern flight has opened the world up to new opportunities and paved the way to the development of advanced research and technology. But, what made it so groundbreaking? This book uncovers the stories behind the first aeroplane models, the development of flight, and brings you to present-day marvels such as the Gypsy Moth and Supermarine Spitfire. The Mosquito seemed safe. Until, that is, Freeman’s department was brought under the control of Churchill’s new Minister for Aircraft Production, Daily Express owner Lord Beaverbrook, who, demanding complete focus on a core of five existing aircraft, told Freeman to cancel it.