This book covers the complete and long overdue history of the Hunting/BAC Jet Provost and Strikemaster, which for thirty-eight years trained generations of pilots and pioneered the RAF’s all-through flying training program.
This is a story written by a young man who trained as a pilot, and then flew with the Royal Flying Corps in France during the First World War, eventually to become an ace.
Essentially a development of the Avro Lancaster via the later Lincoln, the Avro Shackleton was the RAF’s first line of defence in the maritime role from 1951 for twenty years, thereafter continuing to serve as an airborne early warning aircraft for another twenty, until 1991.
Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Johns was commissioned at the RAF College Cranwell in 1959 after completing flying training on Piston Provost and Meteor aircraft.
In this compelling memoir, Erich Sommer recalls his life in pre-war Germany and the adventures he had flying for the Luftwaffe during the Second World War.
Since he was a child in the 1950s watching Vampires and Meteors operating from RAF Turnhouse, Jim Walls wanted to fly aircraft, he just never envisaged that his flying career would be spent in the back seat as opposed to the front.
Chris Burwell charts one man's career in aviation from joining the RAF in 1969 aged 18, to having responsibility for training pilots for the world's major airlines nearly 50 years later.
The Folland Gnat was used by the RAF mainly in the advanced training role, in the 1960s and 70s, where it proved to be an ideal lead-in trainer for high-performance aircraft such as the iconic Lightning, the first RAF supersonic fighter.
Following the critically acclaimed publication eight years ago of Buccaneer Boys, long-serving Buccaneer navigator Air Commodore Graham Pitchfork has now followed up the great success of the book with more true tales from those who flew the last all-British bomber.
Since the end of World War 2 the primary role of the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm has been airborne power projection; the ability rapidly to respond to any trouble spot across the globe and to protect the interests of the United Kingdom and its partner nations.
This is the story of an ordinary young man, unworldly, untried and patriotic, who enlisted at 18 in 1942 and became an infantryman specialising as a machine gunner with the Middlesex Regiment and later with the Cheshire Regiment.
In December 1949, I, as a young man of 18, arrived in a different world - RAF Shaibah, 7 miles or so from Basra in Iraq, to do my (extended) two-year National Service.
September 1914, and the whole of Europe was at war following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his beloved wife Sophie by Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo on 28th June 1914.
First raised by his maternal grandmother and her four youngest sisters in the harbour city of Le Havre, in the English Channel, a boy, Jean, will discover later in tragic circumstances the love of his mother.
Following the 1952 reorganization of the Portuguese Air Force from the army and naval air arms, Portugal now had an entity dedicated solely to aviation that would bring it into line with its new NATO commitment.
With Ethiopia in disarray following a period of severe internal unrest and the spread of insurgencies in Eritrea and Tigray, Ethiopia and its armed forces should have offered little opposition to well-equipped Somali armed forces which were unleashed to capture Ogaden, in July 1977.
In Harrier Boys, Volume One: Cold War Through the Falklands, 1969-1990, Robert Marston, who flew Harriers for many years, draws together accounts from others who worked with this unique jet through its history.
Originally intended as a trainer, the Anglo-French Sepecat jet, equipped with the very latest in weapon-aiming and navigational equipment, eventually became the backbone of the RAF’s tactical strike-attack and recce forces for a decade from the mid-1970s.
208 Squadron based at RAF Valley in Anglesey will be celebrating its 100th anniversary in October 2016, making it one of the few RAF squadrons to achieve this unique distinction whilst still part of the RAF’s current order of battle.
In the second volume of Harrier Boys, as with the first, the history of this remarkable aircraft in service with UK armed forces is illustrated through personal reminiscences of the people who worked with it.
Designed by Sydney Camm as a swept wing, daytime interceptor with excellent maneuverability, the Hunter became the first jet aircraft manufactured by Hawker for the Royal Air Force.
208 Squadron based at RAF Valley in Anglesey will be celebrating its 100th anniversary in October 2016, making it one of the few RAF squadrons to achieve this unique distinction whilst still part of the RAF’s current order of battle.
The events in Jet Age Man took place during the early Cold War, an era that will go down as a period when civilization teetered on the edge of the abyss.
Jimmy Sheddan was one of the many New Zealanders who joined the RNZAF, then left his native land to come to England to fight the enemies of Great Britain and her Empire during World War Two.
When Canadian troops and British Commandos made their now famous ‘reconnaissance in force’ against the harbor town of Dieppe on 19th August 1942, they were supported and protected by the largest array of Royal Air Force aircraft ever seen in WWII until that time.
Born in London of an English father and Australian mother and educated in Switzerland, Billy Drake was to become one of the most illustrious RAF fighter pilots of World War II, indeed of all time.
This book is largely an eye-witness account of the heavy bomber contribution to the success of the D-Day landings and therefore to the winning of the war in Europe.
The diary kept by Ronald Edward Tritton is a revealing and often frank record of the internal conflicts at the Public Relations Department of the War Office and the Ministry of Information during the Second World War.
Under Himmler's Command addresses two areas of World War II hitherto neglected - Heinrich Himmler as a military commander, and the German staff officer corps during the last months of the war on the Eastern Front.
The Great Patriotic War (GPW) of the Soviet people against Nazi Germany, known in the West as the Eastern Front of WWII, continues to attract a number of military historians from different countries around the world.
This book captures the experience of the South African Air Force helicopter pilot as never before; from 'rookie' to seasoned combat aviator in one of history's most intense counterinsurgency conflicts - the South African Border War.
Most studies of the 1940 Western Campaign have tended to focus on a narrow range of topics, principally those relating the German forces or the epic of Dunkirk.
Translated from German, In a Raging Inferno is the first English-language book ever to recount the story of the Hitler Youth and its combat role at the end of World War II.
