Customer Reviews

Dark Sky, Black Sea: Aircraft Carrier Night and All-Weather Operations

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This is a sound history of U.S. Navy night operations from the beginning to the present. Along the way, the reader picks up a lot of carrier lore that applies equally to day operations. What distinguishes this book from the usual Naval Institute Press study is that Mr. Brown was one of the aviators that he's writing about. Where he can, he gives first-person recollections, and throughout the book he relies heavily on interviews with fellow aviators.

I've only made it through WW II - the book is not very interesting. Mostly he seems to care about Order of Battle for night flying units - the unit names, what equipment they had, who the leaders were. He summarizes how many planes they shot down. But there is very little about the technology of night flying, what problems came up and how they were solved, and what they DID every night. I've read some autobiographies of night flyers which were much more interesting.

Every person who reads a book like this probably has different goals. Mine were to find out what it was like to fly at night, what made it hard, how it gradually got easier. Maybe the last half of the book has such information, but I stopped before I got there.