Book Review: World's Strangest Aircraft

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Summary

A large format book with lots of large pictures and less than 100 pages, this is a quick read. This is what some would call a coffee table book.

Organized into five chapters, each one tackles a broad category of aircraft. For example, chapter three is titled "The Desperate Struggle" and it covers military experimental aircraft from World War II. Chapter four is mostly about tailless designs. The last chapter is a general catch-all chapter covering general oddball aircraft, including helicopters.

An introduction to each chapter sets the stage for the aircraft covered. Then, one paragraph is devoted to each specimen.

The Good

There are a lot of airplanes in this book that I don't remember seeing anywhere else. Specially the first two chapters on early aviation pioneers before World War II, which are filled with wonderfully interesting airplanes. There are many fascinating Russian aircraft throughout the book, but specially in these early chapters.

Generally speaking, the pictures chosen for the book nail their subjects. They are great. Many in full color, all contain lots of details that really bring their subjects to life.

This book is a very easy read. The writing is solid, tying together all the aircraft discussed very nicely.

The Bad

I did not find any typos, but there is a picture caption that is missing its picture. That did not look so good.

Most pictures do not contain enough detail to even begin designing a scale model. That really was not a surprise. There is only one picture per aircraft, and many are side profile ground shots. In other words, there is no information provided on the shape of the wing.

I was already familiar with maybe a third of the aircraft in the book. Even in these cases, the text proved interesting and the pictures were great, bringing these aircraft to life in new ways I had not experienced before.

The Ugly

There are almost no specifications included for the aircraft. Oddly, just about the only specification that one can count on finding for each subject is the horsepower for its engines. Airplane dimensions are almost never given. It seems that the horsepower ratings are used as a stand-in for more detailed aircraft specs. Any other numbers that are provided strictly depends on whether the author found them interesting.

There are no pictures included for many of the aircraft discussed. This was a major disappointment. A paragraph of text without a picture is just not enough to get much of value out of it. I would have preferred it if the author had left out these aircraft entirely and either expanded the text for the other airplanes or included a second picture from a different angle.

Conclusion

This book does a great job of what it set out to do. It is filled with great pictures of lots of very interesting aircraft. The text is a good complement to the pictures and adds interesting details to these aircraft. Just do not expect it to be a great resource for a scale modeler.

Used copies of this book are very inexpensive. I only paid a couple of bucks for mine and it was in great shape. I definitely do not regret making the purchase.

http://www.rcadvisor.com/ founder - Home of the best model airplane calculator. Free!

Author of RCadvisor's Model Airplane Design Made Easy and other books.

Host of Ask the RCadvisor in the free weekly The Crash Cast podcasts.

AMA Scientific Leader and Contest Director #4601.

Book Review - Scale Aircraft Drawings: World War I

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Summary

This 150 page book covers 35 World War I airplanes through the use of over 40 highly detailed "master" drawings. They are all drawn at a consistent scale of one quarter inch to one foot. As best as I could tell, all of the classic designs are included.

The book was published by Air Age, the same company that publishes Model Airplane News magazine. Although not stated explicitly, my assumption is that these drawings were all originally published in the magazine.

The Good

Wow. These drawings are a dream come true. They are incredibly detailed. Frankly, most of them are plain gorgeous. The drawings were all made with modelers in mind. They contain excellent details about each airplane's internal structure as well as showing full details about external markings. Outlines of the airfoils used are always included. Many of the drawings even contain detailed information on the layout of the instrument panel. In other words, they are all that one needs to construct a highly detailed scale model airplane.

As a bonus, detailed drawings of some of the engines and armaments (machine guns and bombs) are included in the back of the book. They were drawn to the same high standard as the aircraft drawings.

The Bad

It appears that all of the drawings have been scaled down to fit within the dimensions of the book. There is no indication given as to how much each drawing was scaled down. It would take some detective work to look up a key dimension for the airplane, such as its wingspan, and use that to extrapolate the scale of each drawing. The publisher could have saved us the trouble by including this information.

A preface to the book encourages the reader to order full size drawings from the Air Age store. I only managed to find four master drawings for sale in their store, and none were for World War I aircraft. Buying a set of drawings from them may have been a possibility in the past, but it is clearly no longer a viable option.

On average there are two pictures per airplane included. Most of the pictures are small, and the quality varies a lot. If you are building a scale model, you might have to supplement the included pictures with others discovered through additional research.

The text that accompanies the photos and the drawings is useful, but very short. Only about a third of a page is devoted to each aircraft. That is really just enough to touch the surface of what is known about these airplanes. The good news here is that it is a lot easier to find text that describes these airplanes than it is to find quality drawings.

The interior of the book is all in black and white. This means that the photographs are all in black and white, which should not come as a surprise given the time period of the airplanes. But it also means that the descriptions of colors in the external markings are all textual. It would be a challenge to accurately recreate a color only described as "dulled light green", for example.

The Ugly

Many of the drawings in the book were created by William Wylam. Mr. Wylam started producing airplane drawings for Model Airplane News in the late 1930s. That was 80 years ago! The amount of research that has gone into documenting these aircraft in more recent years is enormous. We simply know now a lot more about these airplanes than we did at the time Mr. Wylam was creating his drawings.

The end result of all this is that the technical accuracy of many of the drawings included in the book has been called into question in recent years. The magnitude of the reported errors varies a lot. Some of the airplane outlines are said to be off a little bit. Some of the registration numbers shown on the aircraft have been discovered to belong to entirely different airplanes. Other errors in his drawings are reportedly more serious.

Conclusion

I find it very hard to fault Mr. Wylam for the reported errors in his drawings. He had a job to do, and he did his best. I am told that many model airplane kits have been released over the years containing the same errors as found in the book. Hmmm. I wonder which book they used as their primary source!

I don't think these discrepancies detracted from the enjoyment derived by the kit builders from flying their airplanes. If your goal is to create a highly accurate scale model, you are well advised to supplement your research with additional sources.

Despite the warning above, I cannot imagine a serious fan of World War I scale model airplanes that wouldn't benefit from consulting this book.

http://www.rcadvisor.com/ founder - Home of the best model airplane calculator. Free!

Author of RCadvisor's Model Airplane Design Made Easy and other books.

Host of Ask the RCadvisor in the free weekly The Crash Cast podcasts.

AMA Scientific Leader and Contest Director #4601.