Customer Reviews

Great Book of Fighters: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Every Fighter Aircraft Built and Flown

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Twenty-five years ago I bought William Green's 'Warplanes of the Third Reich' and still consider it the best aviation reference book in my library. This book doesn't contain the same extreme level of detail of the other book but is still quite impressive. With a photo and brief description of 1700 fighters this book will excite any aircraft enthusiast.

The name sounds like something for 6-year-old kids but this is a serious work. The coverage is exceptional and unlike so many other books in this category this one does not play favorites. The major US, British, and WW2 Luftwaffe aircraft are covered well, but so are all the obscure types. Depth and amount of text accompanying some of the more obscure Soviet fighters is particularly impressive, as are the cutaways of more rare and unusual aircraft (e.g. Dewoitine D.510) as well as some deserving but forgotten types (CAC Boomerang, Ouragan, Su-17). All eras, from WW1 to modern, are given fair treatment.

Each aircraft is given a history of development, notable service, and variants (in most cases, significant variants have separate entries), followed by the specs. In addition to 80+ cutaways there are 470 color profiles, and there is a plethora of well-reproduced photos many of which I've not seen before. The book claims to cover over 1,700 aircraft and there was nothing I could throw at it that it didn't cover, including obscure French, Italian and Soviet designs.

I do have a few complaints. The book could have used another round of proofreading -- there are no factual errors I could find but I came across some misspellings and misplaced photos (many concentrated in the F-4 Phantom II article for some reason). Being a book on military aircraft, it's strange to find armament information tucked into the text and not delineated in the specifications. The same goes for engine specs. And the cutaways, while very nice and detailed (200+ items labeled in the key is typical for modern aircraft) span two pages which means information is lost in the crease.

Overall, this book is a superb value and in many ways a superior alternative to Jane's.

This is an excellent reference book for those of us who enjoy airplanes and military history. A vast, double-folio sized book, Fighters is a comprehensive illustrated volume which attempts to cover virtually every fighter plane ever produced - from ill-fated prototypes to successful mass-produced planes like the Supermarine Spitfire, Mig 15, McDonnell-Douglas Phantom and the Grunmann F-14 Tomcat. The text is straightforward, terse and technical, but then, this is a reference work, not a narrative volume. Written by William Green, Gordon Swanborough and Mike Spick, all veteran aviation journalists, Fighters is a great table-top reference for the aviation enthusiast.

The pictures and text really compliment each other. More
drawings and info packed into one book than I've ever seen.
If you've ever wanted a book that covers every fighter, this
is it.

I finally found a William Green opus my father hadn't seen. The book is classic Green: no-nonsense, just the facts, with beautiful graphics and detailed histories of every (and I mean e-v-e-r-y) fighter aircraft ever flown. A great surprise for the airplane-oholic on your gift list.

This book is without a doubt THE classic compendium of all fighters ever dsigned or manufactured. It is exhaustive in detail and catalogues many planes you would never find in any other book.

There is however, no analysis of the planes in their overall historical contribution to airpower or technological development. As a result the book is replete with a lot of facts on the aircraft, but there is no critical or lauditory comment on any. Therefore we do not know that the Hurricane was an excellent gun-platform, and the Buffalo possibly the worst fighter in history. Neither do we know which series of the Me109 was "better" against the allies, nor do we know that Japanese "Betty" bombers were called the "one-shot-lighter" because of there tendency to explode easily.

All in all there is too much colour missing from this collection for it to really enthrall as much as it could have. As a result my bathroom reading is that much less intense and enhanced...

I shall await other, newer editions to rectify this weekness.

PS: This book weights about 10Kgs. Hefty in the bathroom... bring a reading stand.

This is an incredible book. I own many reference books on military aircraft, and one of my biggest complaints is that most of them leave out planes that should be otherwise in them. This book is not one of them. It is an exhaustive collection of fighter aircraft, from the popular (P-51, Spitfire) to the obscure (XP-79B (we designed a plane in WWII to do WHAT??!!)). I HIGHLY recommend this book to any military aviation fan.

I like this book. It's very affordable for the quality of the book itself--I purchased it to have as a handy reference. As a reference, it is quite good, though topical. I have had several compendiums on fighter aircraft, but this one contains strange/one-off fighters I have never seen before (Caudron-Renault C714 Cyclone anyone?). The data for each aircraft is not too detailed, but it's worth having in your aviation library.

It has every fighter that I know and a lot of that I have never heard in my like. Excellent work.