BOOK REVIEWS
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Planes
FROM THE WRIGHT BROTHERS TO THE SUPERSONIC
Author: Jan Van Der Veken
Publisher: Prestel Publishing
Price: £15.99 / $19.95
Release: 4 March
Belgian author Jan Van Der Veken is both a pilot and an award-winning newspaper and magazine illustrator, who has put his two passions together to create Planes: an illustrated history of human flight with a strong science angle. It’s as slick and beautiful as a Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit.
Charting the history of flight from the Wright brothers to the age of supersonic jets, with each turn of the page the reader will advance an era and discover the next step that engineers and pilots made to advance aviation.
Even the basics of aerodynamics are a complicated subject, so it takes some expertise to distil that into a few simple, comprehensible paragraphs. A page on the mechanics of flight is followed by an example of an aircraft that highlights its generation. The concept of ground effect, for example, was utilised by Russia’s Caspian Sea Monster, a massive Cold War-era aircraft that took advantage of the reduced drag experienced when flying close to the surface of the water. Sometimes there’s some science that Planes describes in putting these aircraft under the spotlight, but other times there’s just a good story behind them – like the mystery of Charles Lindberg’s double-propellor Lockheed P-38 Lightning, which went missing with its pilot over the south of France in 1944.