You are not logged in.

Wings of the Luftwaffe

Dear visitor, welcome to WesWorld. If this is your first visit here, please read the Help. It explains in detail how this page works. To use all features of this page, you should consider registering. Please use the registration form, to register here or read more information about the registration process. If you are already registered, please login here.

HoOmAn

Keeper of the Sacred Block Coefficient

Posts: 7,417

  • Send private message

1

Tuesday, May 8th 2012, 7:11pm

Wings of the Luftwaffe

Together with "Wings of the Weird and Wonderful" I got "Wings of the Luftwaffe" by Eric Brown, and here is my review:

What can you expect?
Driven by the success from his earlier book, Brown introduces us to his experience with German aircraft of the 1930s and 1940s. For every plane he gives a brief summary on how he got involved with the plane, then reviewing flight characteristics and finally rating the design against comparable aircraft.

Different to "Wings of the Weird and Wonderful" are short introductions to each company that got its planes into the book.

What you should not expect?
Like his earlier book "Wings of the Luftwaffe" is not a reference book for design history and technical data. The latter is only mentioned where Eric refers to it to reflect a designs capabilities and features.

Worth the money?
I think so. Eric Brown offers experience nobody else can hope to match and although his ratings are solely based on his personal experience (and bias) and do not represent an academic approach to the issue, they provide some decent insight into capabilities of a plane and technical features - some even surprising. For example, the He219 does not rate very high because Brown experienced her as being underpowered for a twin engine aircraft, though he does not deny the overall superb engineering performance of the Heinkel team.