Modern Commercial Aircraft. - Review - book review

Aerospace Power Journal, Summer, 2000 by Gilles Van Nederveen

Modern Commercial Aircraft by Gunther Endres et al. Salamander Books Limited (http://www.combinedpublishing.com/l999salam.html), Combined Publishing, Inc., 476 West Elm Street, P.O. Box 307, Conshohocken, Pennsylvania 19428, 1998, 216 pages, $35.00.

Modern Commercial Aircraft is a well-illustrated, easy-to-read survey of commercial aircraft, airline operations, and modern aircraft construction. It covers most major airliners in service today and lists future projects under development at Airbus and Boeing. The book also deals with the huge market of airfreight operations. The final chapter provides an overview of airlines and their fleets in 1998, a helpful reference in determining who has the most modem fleet in the business.

The cornerstone of any Salamander book, however, is the illustrations--both the pictures of aircraft types and the excellent cutaway drawings. Non-British readers will discover through detailed discussion and drawings how aircraft that land at the two London airports--Heathrow and Gatwick--are stacked by air traffic control to ensure maximum usage of available airspace. A chapter entitled "Minor Aircraft" also allows the reader to track aircraft that have been retired from regular airline service but continue to haul freight around the world.

The book has a few minor typos that could have been avoided with careful editing, but they are not severe enough to detract from an otherwise excellent book. Mistakes in labeling aircraft depicted in photographs are more troubling, however. An Ice-landair DC-8 is identified as a Boeing 757-200. Lumping the An-24/26/30/32 into one data block does no justice to this large fleet of cargo and passenger haulers in the former Soviet Union. Finally, the authors could have supplied a photo of the An225 Mriya to show readers its enormous size, as they did for both the Super Guppy and Beluga airframes in service with Airbus.