US Military Aircraft Designations And Serials 1909 To 1979

For anyone who has ever looked at “F-4,” “B-17,” or “C-47” and thought, “Splendid—but what bureaucratic sorcery produced that?”, John M. Andrade’s US Military Aircraft Designations and Serials: 1909 to 1979 is here to escort you into the surprisingly complicated filing cabinet of American military aviation.

Covering seventy years of aircraft designations and serial numbers, this formidable reference work charts the bureaucratic evolution of America’s military flying machines—from the fragile contraptions of 1909, when aviation was largely canvas, wire and unreasonable optimism, to the formidable jets of 1979, when aircraft had become faster, deadlier and considerably more expensive to misfile.

Andrade brings order to an enormous flock of fighters, bombers, transports, trainers, reconnaissance aircraft and assorted airborne oddities. Army, Air Force and naval designation systems are laid out and decoded, allowing readers to discover why one aircraft might change its name, number or prefix without changing the inconvenient fact that it was still essentially the same aeroplane. It is aviation history viewed through the stern spectacles of official nomenclature.

There are serials. There are designations. There are redesignations. There are prefixes, suffixes and strings of letters that look as though someone dropped a typewriter down a staircase. Happily, Andrade knows what they mean. The result is an invaluable guide for historians, researchers, aircraft modellers, serial-number detectives and anyone whose idea of an exciting evening involves finally identifying that barely visible machine in the background of a grainy wartime photograph.

This is not a glossy collection of heroic pilots staring meaningfully into the middle distance. Nor is it an action-packed account of dogfights, daring raids or moustaches surviving at altitude. It is something rarer: a serious, densely packed reference book devoted to ensuring that every machine is correctly identified before anyone begins arguing about it.

Its coverage stretches from aviation’s pioneering years through two world wars, Korea, Vietnam and the Cold War, encompassing an era in which aircraft progressed from tentative airborne furniture to supersonic weapon systems. Along the way, the American armed forces repeatedly reorganised their naming conventions, presumably because operating thousands of aircraft was not complicated enough already.

For the aviation enthusiast, this book is a navigational instrument. For the modeller, it is protection against applying the right markings to the wrong variant and being quietly judged at the club meeting. For the writer, curator or researcher, it is the sort of dependable volume that settles arguments with the impersonal authority of a stamped government form.

It is also ideal for readers who enjoy lists—not merely ordinary lists, but disciplined formations of letters and numbers marching across the page with military precision. Read it from cover to cover if you possess uncommon stamina, or keep it close at hand for those urgent moments when you simply must know where one designation series ended and another bureaucratic adventure began.

Published by Midland Counties Publications, this is the sort of specialised reference work the internet claims to have replaced, right up until six websites contradict one another and somebody confidently identifies a trainer as a strategic bomber. A physical book does not demand cookies, open twelve advertising windows or ask whether you would like notifications. It simply sits there, quietly knowing things.

A splendid acquisition for the aircraft obsessive, military historian, modeller or collector of serious aviation references—and a terrible gift for anyone hoping for a light romantic comedy involving stewardesses.

This copy is in As New condition: clean, exceptionally well preserved and apparently spared the traditional hardships of workshop benches, oily fingerprints and late-night serial-number investigations. Offered by Crappy Old Books, where the company name remains magnificently less impressive than the stock.

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