Aviation Records in the Jet Age: The Planes and Technologies Behind the Breakthroughs

by William A. Flanagan

Specialty Press, 2017. 192 pages. $39.95

Ciudad del Carmen My sense—and that is all it is, a sense—is that the author’s title was much closer to simply Aviation Records rather than as now titled, and that marketing got a hold of it, and tried to spin it for sales. Frankly, if purchased by title alone, you should get your money back. The first jet doesn’t appear until page 32 of the 183-page book; losing nearly 20 percent of the real estate. And that doesn’t include about 20 more pages concerning non-jet aircraft, but are technically within the scope of the title as their records were set in the jet “age.”

buy modafinil in the us Enough about titles and spin. Ignore the title. What do you get for your money?

Easily more than 50 percent of the book is dedicated to imagery, most of it large, and all of it very detailed. They are well reproduced on the typical slick glossy stock one recognizes as a Specialty Press trademark. The text is well written and authoritative, but it is not Ernie Gann. And that is okay; because the book is aimed at facts, not prose.

But with that in mind along with the title, one would expect to see easily digestible charts showing progression over time or comparisons of higher, faster, farther. There are none. If you want to know the speed increase from 1945 to 1955, you’ll have to search for each in the text and make the comparisons yourself. The only enumeration of records can be found in three pages of two appendices, and at that these are not readily decipherable as each entry is in narrative form. Frankly, I haven’t figured them out.

Appendix One: Speed Records, sub-category Progressive Speed Records In Aviation History lists just 13 records. Obviously this is incomplete. Worse, it has four “No. 10”s. Two could be justified, I guess, because they are for “First Speed Record Faster Than 2,000 mph” in both jet and rocket categories. But the other two 10s are for 3k and 4k mph, all on different dates. Sub-category Major World Speed Records, which numbers to 24, begins with No. 2, includes two No. 4s, and is missing (I think) Nos. 6, 8, 12, 13, 17, 18, and 19. Thankfully, the third sub-category, Significant Speed Flights by Mach Number, is not listed by number so there is no confusion on that score.

In the absence of any explanation for this numbering, this is indicative of poor—very poor—editing. What about the rest of the book?

And among the triumvirate of aviation records, farther does not appear at all.

The author provides each of the chapters with a variety of interesting and well-illustrated sidebars to expand on his work. For instance, Chapter 5 relating to airliners and Mach 2 fighters includes a near full-page reproduction of a Fairey Aviation Company advertisement hawking their Delta 2’s official world speed record of 1,132 mph, a sidebar on boosted flight control systems, and one on Russia’s race to have the first jetliner. And that is typical of the chapters. There is so much more here than simply records that it is obvious the author was thinking far beyond the range of the limitation put on his work by the current title.

For me, this book was disappointing in that it did not add much to what I already knew. I am always interested in comparisons and an author’s reasoning for why and how such advances occurred. While there was little to change my views on the subjects, that will not be the case for all readers.

There is much very good and well-explained detail in this book and I highly recommend it for those getting their feet wet in aviation and its goals of higher, faster, farther.

Aviation Records in the Jet Age is available from Specialty Press at 1-800-895-4585 or www.specialtypress.com.

Reviewed May 2017