Teach for the Sky - British Training Aircraft Since 1945 by James Jackson ('Hood')

Sounds like another very interesting book I'll have to buy. Good thing they are not coming out all at once.
 
Wow, this caught me on the hop as I had not expected it to appear so soon on their website!

If you loved Chris Gibson's series so far, you'll love this. Its the same mix of service aircraft and project studies that led to them. Everything post-war is included from Prentices, Chipmunks, Jet Provosts, Gnats, Harriers, Varsities, Hawks, Phenoms, in short a complete potted history of post-war British military training.

The cover art of a trio of Red Arrows BAC P.45s is by Luca Landino (CiTrus90), and he has done another artwork inside the book. Luciano Alviani has also contributed four paintings. So you are in for a visual as well as a textual treat.
 
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Wow, this caught me on the hop as I had not expected it to appear so soon on their website!

If you loved Chris Gibson's series so far, you'll love this. Its the same mix of service aircraft and project studies that led to them. Everything post-war is included from Prentices, Chipmunks, Jet Provosts, Gnats, Harriers, Varsities, Hawks, Phenoms, in short a complete potted history of post-war British military training.
There's a question about whether you cover flight simulators on "The Aviation Enthusiast Book Club" Facebook group.
 
Wow, this caught me on the hop as I had not expected it to appear so soon on their website!

If you loved Chris Gibson's series so far, you'll love this. Its the same mix of service aircraft and project studies that led to them. Everything post-war is included from Prentices, Chipmunks, Jet Provosts, Gnats, Harriers, Varsities, Hawks, Phenoms, in short a complete potted history of post-war British military training.
There's a question about whether you cover flight simulators on "The Aviation Enthusiast Book Club" Facebook group.

Not in depth, but I do touch on aspects of simulators. I'm a member of that group so I'll post a reply directly.

Also, gliders are rather beyond the remit of the book too, as are ATC units etc.
 
Just checked the Crecy Website-this book is no longer listed. Anyone know what happened?
 
Well as far as I know everything is progressing on schedule, I've not heard anything to the contary from Crecy.

EDIT: link above is now working again, it was a technical hitch.
 
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30 July long past. Has anyone been able to buy this book?
 
Today I got the latest situation from Crecy. It seems a paper shortage has delayed printing, plus the usual supply chain issues with shortages of drivers and customs checks are slowing things down. All being well Crecy hope to have it in their warehouse the first week in October.
It seems a lot of their new titles are being delayed by around a month.
 
October has arrived and it's back to the 70s in Bojo Britain. Still looking forward to adding this to my library.
 
Some good news, Crecy has confirmed to me that delivery is expected on Monday so hopefully orders should start to be despatched later next week, those ordering via Amazon might have bit more of a wait.
 

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I completely missed that this book existed, a nice surprise!

Amazon.co.uk has release date as the 20th of November.
 
Anything on the A20 Wamira proposal/development in this?
Yes there is including several images of the mockup that I don't think have been published before.

Amazon.co.uk has release date as the 20th of November.
That's probably a fair date given its October now and shipping these books back out of the country will probably take time.
 
Ordered one from Fleabay so hoping to get it this week. Those P,45 Red Arrows made it a must have.
 
My copy is now safely in my paws. It goes splendidly with Chris's similar tomes.
My eyes lighted with joy on the artwork of the cancelled RAF Lynx trainer. There is much happy reading here.
As a bonus I am posting the cover of the 1967 RAF Souvenir book with a Jaguar trainer in Gnat style colours with a Gnat.
 

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My copy has finally arrived... initial impression is an absolutely superb piece of work... I suspect I shall loose the rest of the weekend to it...

Zeb
 
I suppose these would be good companion volumes if you can find them. They were apparently published with several different cover designs.
 

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Of course,it's very good book,

and why in T16/48 competition,the De Havilland,English Electric,Heston,Miles and Slingsby proposals didn't mention ?.
 
and why in T16/48 competition,the De Havilland,English Electric,Heston,Miles and Slingsby proposals didn't mention ?.
Because they don't exist?

There is pretty copious amounts of technical data for all the T.16/48 entries and certainly these companies are not included in the MoS evaluation or analysis at all, nor mentioned in correspondence.

A Miles entry is illogical as in late 1947 Miles was bankrupt and assets sold to Handley Page - the Reading team designing the HPR.2 for their new owners. There is no mention of a T.16/48 entrant in any Miles company history either. Heston was not designing aircraft at that time.
I'm not aware of any EE, DH or Slingsby designs that would fit this Spec. I very much doubt DH would bother to enter and indeed through DH Canada had just got the Chipmunk production to keep them more than busy enough.
 
Because they don't exist?

Who said that,for the technical data and any report,that's not museare at all,
and we saw in many competitions that,there was a proposals never mentioned
in its document.

The source was; The British Aircraft Specifications File: British Military and Commercial Aircraft Specifications 1920-1949,and logically they had their
reliable sources.

For Miles,that's not clue,for example Vickers bought Supermarine,and
in many contests,they both submitted a two proposals,and for DH,it was
not DHC,and for General Aircraft Ltd,probably it was GAL-62 ?,also for
Heston,Slingsby and English Electric.
 

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The fact that a company sketched a design to T.16/48 does not mean that it submitted a bid.

The authors of The British Aircraft Specifications File: British Military and Commercial Aircraft Specifications 1920-1949 were pretty decent authors.
 
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The source was; The British Aircraft Specifications File: British Military and Commercial Aircraft Specifications 1920-1949,and logically they had their
reliable sources.


The authors of The British Aircraft Specifications File: British Military and Commercial Aircraft Specifications 1920-1949 were pretty decent authors.

The book is a valuable resource on the subject, basically the only one, but unfortunately there are numerous errors throughout. The authors do acknowledge that one of their main sources of information were the Putnam volumes, and these are themselves of variable accuracy, good for their era but showing their age now. Research has moved on considerably since the specification book was compiled and if that work by several authors has failed to locate reliable information to support the existence of the projects listed then there is good reason to question that they were ever anything but vague suggestions. Obviously absence of evidence is not evidence of absence but it does place a huge question mark over the whole thing.
 
I agree with Schneiderman. I worked on the revamp of the same authors' Post-1950 Specifications book and since it was compiled before the grand opening of the archives in the late 1990s, there was a lot that required updating. Not the authors' fault, that was the information they had available.

A lot has changed in the last 25 years. Cue a rematch of the argument from 2018 or thereabouts.

Chris
 
My dears,

we find in this great forum,that we discovered some proposals,and they
were submitted to a competitions,although they didn't mention in official
reports.

Also we can say,they were rejected in early stages,so we can't find them
in original or final documents to those tenders ?.
 
To me it is very suspicious that all these are simply listed as "Basic Trainer T.16/48". Sounds like the authors of The British Aircraft Specifications File were working from a list of supposed T.16/48 tenders and in the absence of hard evidence of actual designs put these in as placeholders.
As far I can ascertain, that list is probably from Ray Sturtivant's History of British Military Training Aircraft published in 1987. His list is: Provost, HPR.2, Air Service Training, Airtech, Auster A.9, Avro, Blackburn & General B.80, Boulton Paul, Chrislea, de Havilland, EEC, Elliotts, Fairey, Folland, General Aircraft, Heston, Miles, Planet, Portsmouth Aviation, Scottish Aviation, Slingsby, Westland.

Sturtivant was another stalwart of Air-Britain and presumably passed it to the Specifications File team, but how he compiled the list is unlikely to ever be known (he died in 2008).
I will say that his list is inclusive of the known tenders but only identifies two by an actual design number (A.9 and B.80), which is a sign that when he complied his list he probably hadn't seen the actual files at Kew but was reliant on Putnam's and other published sources from that time.

As I say it is impossible for Miles to have tendered. After Miles Aircraft had been taken over by its financiers in December 1947, the design and manufacture of aircraft was ended by the new Board. As we know, Handley Page acquired the Reading site during 1948. The specification for T.16/48 was not received at Reading until just before Christmas 1948 and the (now HPR) design team leapt on the work provided to give them something to do - this is clearly documented in the files at Kew. So how could Miles have designed an aircraft a year before T.16/48 was even issued?

The other unknowns might well be untendered designs but they might equally be other trainer designs not specifically intended for T.16/48 but lumped together by coincidence of date (and the fact that T.16/48 seemed to hoover up designs from every wannabe designer in the country).
 

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