History of Aircraft Piston Engines : Aircraft Piston Engines from the Manly Balzer to the Continental Tiara (McGraw-Hill Series in Aviation) [Paperback]

Herschel Smith (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1986

Shows the development of aircraft piston engines from the earliest to more recent ones by brand. Nice diagrams, many details

Product Details

• Paperback: 255 pages
• Publisher: Sunflower Univ Pr; Revised edition (June 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0897450795
• ISBN-13: 978-0897450799
• Product Dimensions: 10.9 x 8.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,229,473 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars good reference book, covers many different engine types., August 22, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: History of Aircraft Piston Engines : Aircraft Piston Engines from the Manly Balzer to the Continental Tiara (McGraw-Hill Series in Aviation) (Paperback)

Good reference book but does not read like a novel. It touches on most of the important advances in aircraft piston engines but does not go into great detail on any individual engine. Rather, it gives an overview on many different engines spending more time on engines with significant step forward.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good attempt to cover an often ignored area., January 17, 2006

By 

Brian Carter (Baghdad, Iraq (Ermita, Philippines and San Antonio, Texas are home)) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: History of Aircraft Piston Engines : Aircraft Piston Engines from the Manly Balzer to the Continental Tiara (McGraw-Hill Series in Aviation) (Paperback)

In the preface, the author candidly admits he is not a historian or an expert in engines, he is just a history buff interested in aircraft engines that was "tired of waiting" for somebody else to write this book.
The book is dated. While that makes for one or two odd passages referring to modern engines, that has little or nothing to do with 95% of that discusses older aircraft engines. As the author implied, the true value of this book is that it covers in-depth a subject that is really ignored elsewhere. For all the books on aircraft, very little has been published on the engine development. That makes it challenging to compare, because there is no competition.
The book is well written, but there are a few errors that the editor should have caught. For example, on page 222, one paragraph begins to insert (presumably) German words. I read "Der extensions", "piston und kompressing some of the kraftstoffe", and I have no idea what "upgesticken" means.
For a humble history buff, the author is decidedly opinionated, even cynical at times. He makes several emphatic statements about poor design, engineering decisions, and other matters. Perhaps if he supported his statements with authoritative sources, but the reader is just left with his opinion. One irony was a negative comment (originally published in 1981) on the commercial failure of the Wankel rotary engine - just as Mazda started a 10 year run of explosive sales of rotary powered sports cars.
Graphics are the biggest drawback to this book. Point blank, the drawings and pictures are not very useful.
There are very few cutaways. Most of the graphics are photographs of museum pieces, and none of them are highlighted or have labeled parts. Some graphics are very crude drawings attempting to show the mechanical movement of a certain part of the engine, but they lack reference points to the engine. The reference points are critical to understanding how a piece fits into the engine design.
Unfortunately, for discussing the deep technical mechanics of how something works, clear drawings are essential. Entire sections are rendered virtually useless by the lack of supporting graphics. There are lots of graphics included, they just aren't helpful enough.
Despite mentioning the aircraft powered by the engines, only a handful of the aircraft are shown. This is a minor point given the inadequate graphics overall, but have a thick aircraft reference book nearby to look up the aircraft.
Despite this, the book is still worthwhile. The author obviously made a valiant attempt to document a segment of history that was previously ignored. Cutaway drawings are expensive, and the author probably did all he could with the resources available.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good coverage, but little depth, June 28, 2005

By 

Maury Markowitz (Toronto, ON) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: History of Aircraft Piston Engines : Aircraft Piston Engines from the Manly Balzer to the Continental Tiara (McGraw-Hill Series in Aviation) (Paperback)

Generally I like this book, and refer to it all the time. I particularily like the conversational writing style. However it fails either in breadth or depth, so it you have to supplant this with other books as well.

Forget about trying to get the history or real details on any particular engine. If you're looking for the history or lineage of something like the Jumo 211, it's just not there. But at the same time it could not be considered encyclopedic either. Only the major engines are mentioned, and even in that case there seem to be a lot of missing examples.

Another problem is the low quality of the illustrations and photographs, but they do serve their purpose.

Finally, I couldn't shake the feeling that this book really should have been better researched. The author often asks questions along the lines of "I wonder why they did...", when the answer is fairly well known.