The British Aircraft Specifications File

Ref: 5155

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{detailed description}From the Foreword by Sir Peter Masefield:
Here, for the first time, is a specialist feast of information on British aircraft design and development, to be enjoyed and digested by everyone who has a serious, or even a passing, interest in the evolution of British aircraft, and of the British aircraft industry, during its first, and most formative, four decades. This is, indeed, a major historical work to be widely welcomed and greatly valued. It contains data about every British aircraft - military and commercial - which has been the subject of official British design specifications of requirement, first by the War Office, then by the Air Board and, from 1920, by the Air Ministry. This meticulous and comprehensive record of, in round figures, different types of aircraft, is something to be savoured and relished. The 1,192 individual design specifications (935 military and 257 civil) start from tentative beginnings in 1908 with Samuel Cody's first successful aeroplane, flown at Farnborough on 16th October 1908. And they go on through the years to Specification F.28/49 for a development of the Hawker P. 1052 for Australia - a single- seat, swept-wing prototype fighter with a Rolls-Royce Nene jet engine.
In the space of 41 years, aircraft development had progressed from the 30 mph of Samuel Cody's "British Army Aeroplane No. 1" to the better than 500mph of Sydney Camm's jet prototype. In between, a thousand other aircraft marked the way forward. Through all of this, from the somewhat haphazard official start, there runs a bright thread of many strands which links, in the form of design requirements - and the way in which they were met, - a galaxy of British aircraft of which the outline requirements, meticulously researched and set out here, illustrate an industrial revolution, as well as the developing strategy of official thought.
{Author / Publisher / Date}by K. J. Meekcoms and E. B. Morgan
published by Air Britain 1994 pictorial laminated boards
{condition}very slightly bumped corners, otherwise fine.
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