Ebook: The Complete Illustrated Encyclopedia of the World’s Aircraft

Chartwell Books Inc., 1993, 320 p. — ISBN 89009 771 2.This encyclopedia is the first fully international guide to list all the world's manufacturers of production aircraft, both military and civil, from the beginning of powered flight to the present day. The A-to-Z arrangement of this valuable reference book provides details of almost 1500 manufacturers and is designed to give the general reader a wide acquaintanceship with the thousands of different types of aircraft and at the same time serve the more knowledgeable expert with easily accessible basic information.The basic aim, from the beginning of this project, was to produce a single-volume encyclopedia of aviation for a general readership. It was, however, to be very different from any published reviously,
comprising a comparatively brief survey of aviation history, followed by an alphabetical listing of manufacturers of heavier-than-air, powered, production aircraft. The daunting feature, from the
point of creating this alphabetical List, was that it had to extend from the Wright brothers to early 1978. It thus commemorates, by the time of its publication, the first three-quarters of a century of powered flight. So this, in effect, is the composition of this volume; it has, in addition, a brief glossary, and a detailed index of all the aircraft mentioned in the text.