Product Description

Throughout aviation history there have been many aircraft designs that have failed to progress beyond the drawing board for a variety of reasons. The aircraft that have taken to the skies represent only a small percentage of those that were planned.
This latest title in the highly successful Secret Projects series is also the first to deal with United States aircraft. Compiled by Tony Buttler, who has been researching the subject for many years, this book examines the great variety of U.S. fighter designs between the end of World War II and the period immediately after the USA s withdrawal from Vietnam.
The book covers the immediate postwar designs of subsonic aircraft for both the USAF and USN, U.S. supersonic designs, the U.S. Vertical Take Off and Landing program, and the competitions that ultimately led to the development of iconic aircraft such as the
F-14 Tomcat.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #350069 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

About the Author
Tony Buttler is a full-time aviation historian with numerous published books and articles.

Customer Reviews

You Get to See Behind the Wizard's Curtain
Too often we think of aircraft development as a string of famous planes, almost as if each new and more advanced idea was the natural course of things. Not so. This book shows some of the concepts that never got to wings and engines and some that never got past sketches that could be doodles in a junior high school notebook.

The period covered is the post WWII and Cold War era when far reaching new designs were no just intellectual exercises, but matters of national survival. Seeing the evolution of swept wings, internal versus external engines, and more is very interesting.

Besides, I saw some drawings that looked just like those I made during 8th Grade Math class when Mrs. Keck was boring me to death.

Endlessly fascinating!
I am very much a "What If" sort of airplane buff, so I love prototypes. (You should see the 48th scale Republic F-91 Thunderceptor kit I built with Air National Guard markings and nuclear-tipped Genie missiles...). But this book goes FAR beyond prototypes into the world of the never-built.

It's fascinating to see, for example, the designs that the never got off the drawing board, beaten out by what would become the Century Series. Or to see what the competitors looked like in the competition that was won by the F-16. If you like this sort of thing, you won;t put this book down until you've read the whole thing in one day. Then you'll read it again...

I could write the exact same review about all of the other books in this series.

Just superficial
The author proposes to cover a fascinating period of intense evolution of America's fighter design, but fails on it due to an extremely superficial description of important designs such as F8U-3 and many century series contenders and basically just mentions interesting designs like Northop N-126. The book turns to be a collection of nice pictures poorly commented.