THIS IS THE third edition of a biennial directory of the world’s military aircraft and is a companion volume to the same publisher’s Airliners of the World.
THIS IS THE third edition of a biennial directory of the world’s military aircraft and is a companion volume to the same publisher’s Airliners of the World, which was reviewed in Pilot, January 2000. Each A4 size page deals with two aircraft, and each description comes complete with colour photograph, country of origin, technical data, history and a list of the countries that operate it.
The selection of types covered is comprehensive, and goes from old stalwarts of the military scene (like the Antonov An 2, the Douglas C 47 and the North American T 6 Texan/Harvard) right up to date with the Eurofighter Typhoon, Mikoyan 1.42, the Boeing X 32 JSF and the Lockheed Martin X 35 JSF. The technical data I have cross checked appear to be accurate, the photographs are generally of good quality and well reproduced, and I searched in vain for any omissions of types that I reckoned should have been included but weren’t. I thought I had caught the author out when looking for the Fouga CM 170 Magister jet trainer (which is still in service with many air forces) and found no sign of it under Fouga. But the author had caught me out instead. The Magister is there, quite correctly, under Aerospatiale.
Most of the aircraft data entries which have been carried over from the second edition have been revised to bring them up to date and many have new photographs to illustrate them. Altogether, 313 different aircraft are covered in this excellent publication, together with somewhere around 160,000 words of descriptive text. Like its sister volume on airliners, this is altogether a workmanlike reference book a mine of accurate information this time on the world’s military aircraft. James Allan.
