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Convair Advanced Designs: Secret Projects from San Diego, 1923-1962
 
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Convair Advanced Designs: Secret Projects from San Diego, 1923-1962 [Hardcover]

Robert E. Bradley (Author)
4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)

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Book Description

March 15, 2010
Consolidated Vultee, which later became Convair, built some of the world's best flying boats in the 1930s, and the world's best bombers during World War II. Convair's six-engine B-36 strategic bomber was credited with keeping the world safe during the early throes of the Cold War. But before all these great aircraft took to the skies, scores of ideas and concepts were proposed and analyzed by company management to determine if production would even be feasible.
Convair Advanced Designs is a book that brings these futuristic, but stillborn, concepts to life for the very first time. This book features many never-before-seen company photographs, models, and drawings of such futuristic concepts as a folding-rotor anti-submarine patrol bomber and a giant seaplane passenger transport launched from a high-speed rail car! Readers will also be fascinated to see how certain seemingly unbelievable designs evolved into actual production airplanes years later, such as the giant Convair Tradewind turboprop seaplane transport.

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Convair Advanced Designs: Secret Projects from San Diego, 1923-1962 + Secret Projects: Flying Wings and Tailless Aircraft + American Secret Projects: Bombers, Attack and Anti-Submarine Aircraft 1945 to 1974
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Editorial Reviews

Review

It is a book that I can quite easily provide my highest recommendation. I know you will not be disappointed. ---Modeling Madness, reviewed by Scott Van Aken, May 2010

As readers of this column know, Specialty Press has been cranking out some very high quality books on a wide variety of aviaiton subjects, but Convair Advanced Designs tackles a most interesting aviation niche - aircraft that were designed, but not built. Five stars. ---Air Classics, May 2010

This book will be of interest to the modeler, aviation enthusiast/historian alike. I can recommend it to all that like the subject. ---IPMS, reviewed by Hubb Plott, July 2010

About the Author

Robert Bradley graduated with a degree in physics from the University of Southern California. After graduation he worked for four years at North American Aviation in El Segundo in the Systems and Tactics Group. In1957, he moved to Convair Astronautics (later General Dynamics Space Systems Division) in San Diego where he remained until his retirement. After his retirement in 1993 he became a volunteer archivist at the San Diego Air & Space Museum, specializing in the museum's space and missile collection and its Convair archives. Mr. Bradley has a long-standing interest in aerospace history, with special emphasis on design studies and proposals of projects that did not reach the hardware stage. He lives with his wife Linda in the Pacific Beach community of San Diego.

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 192 pages
  • Publisher: Specialty Pr Pub & Wholesalers (March 15, 2010)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1580071333
  • ISBN-13: 978-1580071338
  • Product Dimensions: 11.1 x 8.7 x 0.9 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #408,725 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

9 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
4.4 out of 5 stars (9 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A splendid piece of aviation history, April 17, 2010
By 
A. Marciniszyn (Detroit, MI United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Convair Advanced Designs: Secret Projects from San Diego, 1923-1962 (Hardcover)
I would not like to overdo it, but this book is great. The layout is superb and readers will see little-known designs and studies supplemented with company drawings, illustrations, photos of models, and in some cases, photos of completed aircraft. Among the surprises were "flying wing" studies which included a tail boom, and those without, a nuclear seaplane, and a Mach 4 Attack Seaplane (dated 1958).

Highly recommended.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Incredible research project, June 10, 2010
By 
James Atkins (Twentynine Palms, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Convair Advanced Designs: Secret Projects from San Diego, 1923-1962 (Hardcover)
I get the impression that the author spent a few years buried in the Convair archives at the San Diego Aerospace Museum digging up all of this arcane information. Given the sheer numbers of entries and the limits on how big a given book can be, I don't much miss a lot of data on each entry. Probably, there isn't much available on a lot of these prujects, because they were (mercifully) terminated at an early stage. It is facinating to review the Consolidated penchant for flying boats and amphibians of all sizes, shapes and roles.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Almost superb, April 22, 2010
By 
James Poitras (Canterbury, NH United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Convair Advanced Designs: Secret Projects from San Diego, 1923-1962 (Hardcover)
This book follows the pack of recent references including the "Secret Projects" series. Unlike those books this one only, obviously, follows the products of Consolidated/Convair Aviation from that company's formation to its evolution into General Dynamics.
For those of you who enjoyed the books on German Secret Projects of WW2 or followed the web site 'Luft'46' you will find much the same format, with short discussion about each project and at least one picture per project, which is why I did not give this book five stars.
Missing from this book are any charts or tables clearly defining the performance parameters of any of the projects which either made it into production or lingered on the drafting boards. Also receiving short change in the project descriptions is anything more than a short explanation of the military or commercial requirement each project was designed to satisfy.

In short this book is an excellent initial resource for those interested in the history of American aviation, listing most of the projects carried out by Convair, but for more depth you will have to look elsewhere.

That said, I certainly hope that this will become the forerunner of a series highlighting each of the major American manufacturers.
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