Aviation Books

Diana Barnato Walker MBE was one of the first female pioneers to break the sound barrier in airflight. Her autobiography reveals her Jewish ancestry including a trip to the Golders Green Jewish Cemetery where the Barnato family plot are interred. She just passed away and I learned about it. She was quite an amazing pioneer but she doesn't get the same press as Amelia Earhart. Regardless, she writes about her marriages, her son, and her life in England during World War II. She was married to a military man. She writes about Life before and after in London, England. She was awarded the military M.B.E. (Member of the Order of the British Empire) in 1965 for her services to flight. I think the book is a great reflection of her life.

My criterion for a good book is one that makes you wish it could never end. Without question, Spreading My Wings falls into that rare category. Diana Barnato-Walker wrote her memoir in a delightful style that keeps you turning pages far into the night. It focuses on her adventures as a young woman during the WWII years while in service as a an aircraft pilot in Britain's Air Transport Auxiliary. She flew every aircraft type imaginable, including 260 different Spitfire fighters. Twenty years later, she set the women's world speed record at nearly twice the speed of sound while at the controls of a British Lightning jet fighter. One account I especially enjoyed went like this. Recently married, Diana's fighter-pilot husband, Derek, obtained permission for them to fly side-by-side in Spitfires to Brussels, Belgium. The city had been captured only a few days before and their landing field was less than 15 miles from the fighting front. The story made the London newspapers, which described the flight as their 'honeymoon.' You just can't get more romantic than that! I'm confident you will enjoy this book as much as I did.

I really enjoyed this book once I got past Diana's earlier years. Which unfortuately make her sound pompous and arrogant, snobby and pretentious and actually rather bratty and in places nasty.

This is unfortunate because if you can get past this bit and onto where she started flying. It is great. It is almost like it is written by a different person. And the accounts of her life learning to fly and in the ATA are fascinating. Real first hand experiences as an ATA pilot flying all the different aircraft. And what is was like for the women ferry pilots.

I recommend this book if you can get past the first part of it.

Beau Grosscup reveals the history of bombing and its effects and does this well for the reader who is looking for a good source for this information. The notion that bombing is somehow humane and ethical is dismantled through exploration of historical precedent. If someone wants to know more about this subject, this text is a very good place to start (as exploring this issue should not end with this book).

Beau Grosscup, Professor of International Relations at California State University, has produced an excellent survey of bombing. He shows that its aim is to terrorise civilians.

Under the laws of war, the deliberate targeting of civilians is a war crime. Article 52 of the 1977 Protocol One of the Geneva Convention says, "attacks shall be limited strictly to military objectives." Article 54 says, "It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove, or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, agricultural areas ... crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies and irrigation works." Article 57 warns those planning military attacks to "refrain from deciding to launch any attack which might be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof."

Bombing cities, towns or villages guarantees that civilians will be killed. This killing is known in advance, premeditated, purposeful, intentional. As law professor Michael Tonry says, "In the criminal law, purpose and knowledge are equally culpable states of mind."

In the 1920s, the RAF bombed Afghanistan, Egypt, Iran, Somaliland, Transjordan, Iraq, South West Africa, India and Burma, to terrify the colonies into submission. Similarly, the French bombed Morocco and Syria, the Italians bombed Libya, Ethiopia and Spain, and the USA bombed Mexico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and China.

In the Korean War, General MacArthur ordered Allied forces to destroy `every factory, city and village'. US and British forces killed 20% of Korea's people.

General Wastemoreland said, "the Oriental doesn't place the same high price on life as does the Westerner. ... life is cheap in the Orient. As the philosophy of the Orient expresses it, life is not important." This apparently justified killing three million Vietnamese people. Kissinger ordered attacks on `anything that moves'. The USAF dropped 285 million cluster bombs on Vietnam and killed 10% of the Vietnamese people.

In Yugoslavia, NATO Commander General Clark ordered the USAF to "demolish, destroy, devastate, degrade, and ultimately eliminate the essential infrastructure of Yugoslavia." They bombed TV and radio stations, phone and computer networks, airports, railways, trains, roads, vehicles, bridges, factories, warehouses, power plants, water plants, 33 hospitals, 344 schools, dams and parks. The RAF dropped cluster bombs throughout the 70-day blitz.

Pentagon officials have admitted that the USAF directly targets Iraqi and Afghan civilians, for example, one told CBS News, "There will not be a safe place in Baghdad." Any attack likely to harm more than 30 civilians required Rumsfeld's personal approval - which he always gave, fifty times between 19 March and 18 April 2003. An Army private said, "We were told there were no friendly forces ... If there was anybody there, they were the enemy. We were told specifically that if there were women and children to kill them." Another said, "Basra is a military town", which is like saying Manchester is a military town.

The media ignore the current intense bombing of civilians in Iraq, and highlight roadside bombings, in which occupation troops can be portrayed as victims. The USAF uses anti-personnel weapons like cluster bombs, phosphorus and napalm, says, "We don't do body counts", then claims that casualties are low.

Similarly, in Gaza, Sharon told the army to use force `without limitation' and one of his officials said, "we may have to use weaponry that causes major collateral damage, including helicopters and plane, with mounting danger to surrounding people."

This book is a well thought out work which explores terrorism from the air, from its beginning. Grosscup documents exactly how this occurs and why it does not work -- except to line the pockets of the corporations that profit from it.

The collaborative effort of avaition experts Walt Shiel, Jan Forsgren, and Mike Little, "T-41 Mescalero: the Military Cessna 172) is the first volume in a planned 'Cessna Warbirds' series from Slipdown Mountain Publications. Enhanced with an informative foreword by aviation historian Robert F. Dorr, "T-41 Mescalero" is a complete history of the quintessential pilot trainer that for some fifty years had served the military aviation forces of 53 countries. Cessna delivered 867 T-41 Mescalero (the military version of the Cessna 172) in four distinct models to the armed forces of the US and a series of other nations that range from Venezuela, Angola and Viet Nam, to Austria and the United Arab Emirates. Now this extensive history, enhanced with personal stories and profusely illustrated with photography, provides a complete record of a military training aircraft that has been produced more than any other aircraft model in the history of aviation. Thoroughly 'reader friendly' "T-41 Mescalero" is a seminal and indispensable addition to personal, academic, and community library Military Aviation reference collections and supplemental reading lists.

A excellent book covering a great plane. Very well written with tons of details. I really liked the listing of airframes and where they ended up. I highly recommend it.

A home run! This book is packed with little known information on the Cessna 172 and all it versions from the very beginning. Walt tracks them down in the US and abroad with well written, concise and to the point language. This book is hard to put down. It is a fitting tribute to argueably the most dependable aircraft still in production. Thank you Walt. This ones is a keeper!

While much has been written about the Apollo missions to the Moon, most of these books have focused on either the spacecraft the got us to the Moon (Moon Lander or Stages to Saturn) or the astronauts (autobiographies by Collins, Cernan, Aldrin) and to a lesser degree, Mission control and the flight controllers. Furthermore, thousands upon thousands of scientific and technical papers have been and are still be written from the data collected by the various experiments that were conducted on the lunar surface. The story of how these experiments got to the moon, which ones were chosen and why, the people who developed this experimental packages and the internal NASA struggles to even get these experiments to the Moon has never been documented, at least in much detail. In his book, the author, Donald Beattie who was the program manager for the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments, details all decisions, meetings, NASA in-fighting and the like that got these important, and initially overlooked surface experiments on the flights to the Moon. The author draws upon his extensive library of NASA memos, publications and the like to craft a really fine book.

The book begins with the usual background information of the author's pre-NASA career where he worked for a major US oil company in South America. After hearing about the space program, on a whim he decides to apply for a position and after several unsuccessful attempts, he lands a position at NASA headquarters in Washington D.C helping to plan the missions and experiments that will be used.

After this introductory section, the books covers the conceptual designs for both the Apollo missions and post-Apollo missions that were planned, the inclusion of the United States Geological Survey to plan the missions and analyze the data, and training of the astronauts to perform various scientific tasks. After these sections, a good portion of the book is devoted to the J-series lunar missions (Apollo 15, 16 and 17) and all the training and hardware that was developed to support them. The book even covers the often overlooked Command Module on-orbit photographic survey, which provided some of the most detailed photographic of the Moon's surface.

While each page of this book is loaded with a lot of very interesting and I would say previously unpublished information, I found the parts of the book which examine the working relationships between the NASA centers, the most interesting. I was dumbfounded to find out that several people at the Manned Spacecraft Center felt that they should be designing and developing the experimental packages for the lunar surface operations even though they were engineers and not scientists. Fortunately, the upper NASA management decided that the design of these packages should be left to the scientists.

In final chapter, "The Legacy of Apollo", the author summarizes what was learned from the Apollo mission to the Moon, what it cost and mostly importantly, what it all meant. That is, people working together can solve very difficult problems and reap great rewards, whether they are scientific or philosophic.

I first saw this book while at my local library and after glancing through it I decided it might be worth a quick look. Once I got home and started reading I quickly discovered that this was no dry Science/History book by some old college professor but a great read that tells a part of the Apollo story that is far to often ignored.
The author was a participant in the development of the NASA experiments and the book is written from the view of an insider, not just someone who has done research on the subject. He discusses field training and the development of the moon simulations here on earth. Read about how they duplicated the lunar sites, including how they made craters, in Northern Arizona so that the astronauts felt as though they had already been there when they got to the moon. He discusses cost and weight problems that were worked out and he shares a great story about astronaut Walt Cunningham's field demonstration of an early space suite design. He shares some of the ideas that were developed for post Apollo projects that were regrettably never realized (including the large MOLAB test vehicle that you can still see today at the Space Museum in Huntsville, Alabama). You learn how moon rocks were stored and examined when brought back to earth and he includes several photos and maps that add to the various storys. All of these subjects are told in a highly readable and sometimes humorous way, so don't get the idea that this is some old NASA text reworked, it's not!
If you enjoyed the 10th episode of HBO's "From The Earth To The Moon" titled "Galileo Was Right" then this book is a must read. This book puts meat on that story about Apollo 17 Astronaut Harrison Schmitt and his selection as the only Science astronaut who went to the moon; in much the same way that other books have told the rest of the story about the "Spider" episode from the HBO series.
I give this book very high marks and I hope the author writes a second book about this subject. By the way, I enjoyed the copy from the library so much, I bought a copy for myself!

The Apollo program was not launched for scientific reasons but plenty of excellent science was carried out during it. This book, written by a NASA insider, gives a good guide to all the planning and development that went into the scientific investigations. In addition, it provides some very interesting material on planned longer duration Apollo and post Apollo missions, including lunar bases. Overall, this book is a great addition to any Apollo enthusiast's library.

Nothing soothes the 3-year-old (boy) soul better than "This Plane" or its partners "This Train" etc. Also a pleasure for parents sick of reading the minutiae in encyclopedia-type aircraft books - the beautiful illustration, simple copy, and brief length are refreshing. I think it could be appropriate for babies through early readers.

My 22 month old son is currently obsessed with airplanes and helicopters. He is constantly peering at the sky, looking for them flying overhead. In my search for a book or two of planes, this is the clear winner. The text is very simple "this plane carries passengers... this plane carries cargo." The illustrations, however, are gorgeous. They are clearly painted by someone with a love for aircraft. Some are historical, some are futuristic. They are a pleasure to view.
While a small toddler will have plenty to oogle (we read this book several times a day-- his request), an older child will enjoy discussing the different aircraft types. Propellers versus jet engines, pontoons versus wheels, etc.
Thumbs up for this simple picture book.

My boys (aged 3) love this book. The illustrations are bright and detailed. The text that accompanies each picture describes what the plane in the picture does that makes it different from other planes (ie. "This planes takes off with a catapult."). My kids can flip through the pages of book for ages. On the inside cover there are additional illustrations of all sort of planes with their official names- a great help for parents who don't have a clue about planes!

The type of book you would sit on a balcony outside and read/look at while imagining a b-17 flying fortress flying right in front of you.....then you suddenly appear in the plane, the pilot is yelling for you to drop the bombs so you can get the heck out of there, but you have to wait till the target appears in your bomb site, then you flip the trigger......bomb after bomb fall into the clear sky as you watch the industrial plants and ship yards of Hamburg Germany ignite into a fireworks display......then you suddenly appear back on your balcony starring into the open clear sky, just hoping that big four engined, porky pined hunk of steel comes out of the sky ready to pick you up for another mission......Yes the book is that good...go get it now!

like you have never seen before. fresh and new. if you are not a vet you can feel what it was like to fly and experence the feelings of the men who flew the one and only WWII aircraft.!!

One of the best compilations of air-to-air photography ever seen, of WWII or other aircraft. This book is on the level of John Dibbs' 'Flying Legends,' but whereas the Dibbs book provides elegant, formally posed portraits of the aircraft, this title shows the birds in more atmospheric settings, but does not sacrifice the sharp focus of Dibbs' work.

This book contains the best air-to-air pictures of any B-29 I have ever seen. They are, of course, of FIFI, the CAF bird. They possess the rare magic that the best of air-to-air photographs have, of making you feel you're actually flying along in the photoship.

I wrote this book. How it wound up here, priced at $184.63 for a used copy is beyond me. I'll sell you an brand new autographed copy for $15 if you contact me at squarf@bellsouth.net. In deference to the Bible, I shall not claim that it is the best book ever written... but, hey! If you have wended your way this deeply into Amazon dot Com and found my book and this page... well, God bless you! Twice, if you buy my book. Three times if you also check stuff out out at www.squarf.com. May you know peace,happiness and love. If you want to laugh, read my masterpiece.
-J. Elman, Author

This book is the perfect book about flying for those of us who know nothing about flying. Mr. Elman has an outlandishly funnybone-tickling way of describing his various and sundry flying escapades.

I, for one, will never be able to look at a picture of a raccoon without bursting into hysterical laughter at the memory of the infamous rabid 'coon episode in Mr. Elman's side-splitter, which needs to be in everyone's bookshelf of humor whether they know anything about flying or not. Even the copyright information is funny.

Bravo, Mr. Elman! If laughter is the best medicine, I have just made you my own personal physician!

Pilot logbook entries seem to have been extracted and made eminently coherent and relevant. We are in the cockpit with the pilot... or on the ground, at general aviation airports... and with him and his zany flying buddies. The book is reader-friendly and non-technical. It is also exceedingly funny! The author is unsparing of everyone, especially himself. The realm of flight, it may be said, is frought with fright, but it is also laced with true hilarity at the hands of this author. I rate it as a five-star prize winner.

I recommend Tiger Tales to those with a passion for aviation. The effort to collect all the short stories and anecdotes from previous employees shows how dedicated all the personell, including the author, were to their jobs and company. This book will tranport you to another time, with drive, curiosity, bravery, and passion, that, unfortuneately, is now gone. I could not put it done 'til it was done.

I recently mentioned to a Hawaiian Airlines Captain that I was a retired Tiger pilot. He smiled and said "what a wonderful club you guys had", I agree. Vern's book gives everyone a peek into that club and its exclusive membership. It's gone now but what memories we have.

I recently mentioned to a Hawaiian Airlines Captain that I was a retired Tiger pilot. He smiled and said "what a wonderful club you guys had", I agree. Vern's book gives everyone a peek into that club and its exclusive membership. It's gone now but what memories we have.

Up till now, my reading has focused on the soldier(s) or battles, sometimes even a good novel (ie War and Rememberance), but I've never attempted to read a book about the fine machines of World War II. Reading this book was a pleasure that I savored.

The book is organized into eight chapters. Each chapter discusses the planes in detail giving manufacturing history, sometimes the designer and usually indicating the specific number of planes produced. The chapter then goes on to describe the action the specific plane saw in WWII. I thought I knew a lot about the Battle of Midway, but it wasn't until reading this book, that I learned that our carrier killer, the Douglas SBD did not have folding wings. It seems ironic or perhaps unusual for a carrier plane to not have folding wings. But I'm not the only one who thought that; an incident is described aboard a CVL where the plane director told an SBD pilot to fold his wings after landing. The pilot told the director "This is an SBD". The director said "Well, fold 'em anyway".

As you read each chapter, much of what is described is illustrated by high quality photos. I think I spent as much time studying the photos as I did looking at the text. The title page has a huge picture of the Enterprise launching her SBD's 12/7/41. One doesn't often see a deck full of SBD's with red dots in the center of the stars, which were painted out mid-1942.

Although the book is loaded with technical language, most is easily understood by the context. The book also discusses other planes used in the south pacific, such as patrol bombers and some of the fighters. It tells of the use of navy planes on the Atlantic side of the WWII theater also.

Whenever possible, the author(s) use personal stories to give one a first hand experience in the cockpit. Mr. Tillman shares his own story helping to restore an SBD-5 in the early seventies. Most of the stories, though, are from 1941-1945. Many are from names I already knew, but I learned of a few more in this book. We had no shortage of heroes in WWII.

This is an excellent book, with numerous beautiful photos. It covers evything from Avengers to Catalinas, including some seldom heard of aircraft. This is a great book for any WW 2 Navy fan or historian. It is on par with the other exceptional books I've bought from MBI.

Barrett Tillman and Bob Lawson have joined forces to produce a true jewel of a book on the US Dive and Torpedo bombers of WWII. Both individuals are recognized experts in the field and their collaboration has yielded a standout treatment of each significant dive and torpedo bomber in service during World War II. The text is an outstanding reference on the origin and development of each type aircraft as well as its introduction and success (or tribulations) in combat. This is nicely balanced by the superb imagery, many in color, and detailed captions. These gents really know their stuff and it shows. If you're interested in this subject and don't have it yet, your collection is not complete.

Awesome color photos of clothing and gear from various collections. Has
black and white and color WWII era photos. Also contains descriptions
and designations of items. The contents also include Class 83, 16, 41, and other manuals. I have been collecting flight gear since the 1980s
and have been waiting for a quality book on this subject for some time.
This book is great along with Mick Prodger's Vintage Flying Helmets. If
you are looking for a book on WWII U.S. Army Air Force flight gear, try
C.G. Sweeting's Combat Flying Clothing and his other book Combat Flying
Equipment.

In spite of the errors noted by Jeff Warner in his own review, this book is an excellent resource. I found it quite useful while researching a museum collection, and think the author has performed a valuable service by making this information available in such an attractive format.

A NOTE TO ALL READERS

As the author of this book, I feel a strong sense of responsibility for everything in it. Naturally, typos and other errors are an inevitable occurrence despite all attempts to achieve perfection. Writers have to overlook the occasional misspelled word or transposed letters and dismiss them as trivial. However, I discovered a number of errors in this book which should be brought to the attention of the reader and corrected. Obviously it is too late to fix any errors in this volume and all of the information in it is there to stay forever, whether it is accurate or not. So, in an effort to affect some degree of damage control, I have included this list of errata to be kept with this book in an attempt to set the record straight for all present and future readers.

* The book was incorrectly titled: "U.S. Naval Aviation Flying Clothing and Gear" by Schiffer. This was a temporary file name given to the text by someone at Schiffer. I reminded my editor to correct the title at all three stages of the editing process but they either forgot or refused to fix the problem. The title should be: "U.S. Naval Aviation Clothing and Equipment". The incorrect title is particularly unfortunate since "aviation" and "flying" are somewhat redundant.

* The U.S. Navy Mark I life vest is incorrectly referred to as "Mark II" throughout the book. This error was due to the "fuzzy logic" used by a computerized grammar correcting program. It appears that references to "Mark I" as in the "Mark I life vest" and "Mark I Willson goggles" was interpreted as a conflict with similar references using roman numerals as in "Mark II Willson goggles" and "World War II". Evidently the grammar correcting program continuously prompted the user to "correct" one or the other and at some point "Mark I" was changed to "Mark II" for all Mark I life vest references in the text.

* The back figure in the facing page photo has the top of his head cut off. The photo was cropped too short by the layout people at Schiffer. There is no excuse for this and it amounts to nothing less than sloppy editing.

* In the last paragraph of the introduction, the word "imposable" should be "impossible".

* Left and right are incorrectly transposed in the caption for the photo at the bottom right on page 126.

* The word "them" should be "the" in the caption at the bottom of page 219.

* On pages 248 and 250, Admiral John S. McCain is incorrectly described as Admiral Marc Mitscher. Both photos were incorrectly captioned at the National Archives. This error is somewhat understandable since both men were admirals, both were aviators, both were very close in age and both bore a resemblance to each other.

I sincerely offer my most humble apologies to all readers for these errors and I hope to include this list with all future sales of this volume. I have been graciously reassured by everyone who currently owns a copy that the aforementioned errors do not diminish the value or scope of work of the book. I encourage all owners of this book to copy and paste these corrections to a printable format and keep them with their copy for future reference.


Jeff Warner