Viscount, Comet & Concorde (Legends of the Air, 3)

The three great British postwar airliners come alive in this the third edition of the Legends of the Air series. One was a pioneer in jet air transport that paid the price of discovering a previously relatively unknown problem in airframe design - fatigue. One was a major commercial success by any standard and a leader in its field. The third was an incomparable technological success that did not find its anticipated world market for a wide variety of reasons. But for the little appreciated effects of metal fatigue associated with the new art of pressurisation, de Havilland's Comet would have secured the destiny of the British aircraft industry for decades to come, so advanced was it compared with the competition. Meanwhile, the Viscount had no such problems, some 444 were built and the type even met with success in the fiercely contested North American market.. The Anglo French Concorde, the 'Big Racer', is elegance personified in an airframe designed in the pre digital age and yet after more than two decades of ultra safe day to day supersonic service is now set to fly on till at least 2010. Viscount, Comet & Concorde features around 70,000 words of text, hundreds of photographs, 48 specifically commissioned color sideview drawings, technical drawings, specification and production tables, and more.