Birch Matthews

I thought that this would be a better book. There are a lot of nice photos and illustrations with plenty of text, but the author seems to lack focus. With a premise of how air racing advanced aviation, he wanders off topic often, including almost a whole chapter on a person who tried to enter the MacRobertson London-Melbourne race with a plane that wasn't able to make the distance and how he kept trying to modify it and get it certified. Not really on topic and not terribly interesting either. There are a number of errors in the book, some technical, some that should have been caught in proofreading. Oddly, after spending most of the book describing air racers and military aircraft and what they had in common, he concludes that air racing didn't really advance aviation, at least not military aviation.

I have the author's book Cobra!: Bell Aircraft Corporation, 1934-1946 and found that excellent, so it is unfortunate that this book is such a disappointment.… (más)