Tony Buttler

A New Standalone Volume
If you own the first edition you will be buying Volume Four to cover the Fighters which are now noticeably absent. (It’s okay. Spend the money, you’ll be happy you did.)
Massively rewritten and revised, this is essentially a new standalone volume and not a revised edition.
This new volume has approximately 15% more pages than the 2004 addition and as mentioned above deletes the fighters. The book is very comprehensive in covering British bomber development in terms of single engine, multi-engine, heavy, maritime patrol and torpedo bombers.
Because the scope goes to 1950, there’s also an eight-page chapter covering the first design explorations of jet bombers including coverage of a jet Mosquito.
Of the appendices, the Projects Summary will probably of the most interest due to its coverage of projects by the small and “also ran” firms such as Folland, and General Aircraft Ltd. This appendix also includes a few line drawings of some these proposed aircraft including one by Parnall(!).
Overall? This book is lavishly illustrated with photographs, line drawings, brochure art, and photographs of a few manufacturer style models. (Some are contemporary scratch-built.) The text does an excellent job of describing each aircraft and does so in a manner that gives the reader an understanding of the various factors and circumstances that were driving each development such as engineering or manufacturing resources, lack of materials, etc.
Highly recommended without reservation and a must buy for anyone interested British aviation from the interwar to post-war period… (mere)

For years I went back and forth over whether I really wanted to add this book to my collection. My thought being that, at a certain point, the author had to start cannibalizing his research base. Be that as it may, when I discovered that I could get this work as an inter-library loan, I decided to feed my curiosity, and discovered that there was actually very little overlap with "US Secret Projects 1;" though there is now not much chance of acquiring a fairly cheap copy. One thing that really stood out to me was how active the Curtiss-Wright Company remained in the jet age, at least in terms of responding to the equipment requirements of the US services.… (mere)

What one has here in this book is something of an oxymoron, in that it's a close examination of a significant airplane that never flew. There was a moment when Britain could have had the first legitimately supersonic aircraft but, due to bad organization, second thoughts, and the multiple issues facing the post-1945 British government, the Miles M.52 was never allowed to achieve its potential. To be fair, and Buttler is nothing but fair, there were some issues that created doubt; particularly how the initial impact of captured German research suggested that this plane's configuration might be a blind alley. This is not to mention the additional sense that achieving supersonic flight was no longer an emergency situation, and development could thus progress in a more deliberate fashion. The real tragedy is that the the design team was never given their day in court, as it were, to defend their design and numbers; there were certainly a lot of second thoughts in British officialdom not long after the fact.… (mere)