Air Forces of the World

Actually it's pretty thin considering that it attempts to survey both the air forces of the world and most of the even remotely important aircraft. They cram a lot of information - most entries for countries are in abstract form, with some countries getting maps, and the largest and most important air arms getting detailed organizational charts. The aircraft digests concentrate on the chief variant of any given aircraft with added information on the less well known. The pictures are a mixed bag.A word about how dated this book is - when published, the MiG-29 existed - as far as we knew - only on "official" DoD sketches that look like they were written by 3rd graders. The Su-27 was virtually unknown. At the same time, the air arms considered such eventually dead-end products as the Mirage 4000, the Lavi and the Chinese "Super-7", and these vaporous machines get equal billing. In all fairness, I'm using hindsight, and that shouldn't detract from this book which is a great time capsule of world air forces, not only as they existed in the Reagan years, but also as they were envisioned.