The Great Planes

The Great Planes are a pilot's choice of the most spectacular, significant, and best-flying aircraft in the exciting history of aviation. Here are The Great Planes' great names—captured with brilliant air-to-air color photography by the author: Wright, Blériot, Fokker, Sopwith, SPAD, Jenny, Ryan, Vega, Ford Tri-Motor, Moth, Waco, Jungmeister, Cub, DC-3, Beech Staggerwing, Me-109, Spitfire, Mustang, Flying Fortress, Grumman, Yak, Zlin, Frati, F-86, Lear, and 707.

Nearly all The Great Planes are still alive and flyable today. They are marvelous to look at, perform superbly—though sometimes idiosyncratically—and have made important contributions to the exciting history of aviation. Author James Gilbert, who knows these aircraft intimately, presents their fascinating biographies here, illustrating them with memorable pictures from international archives as well as his own excellent aerial photography.

James Gilbert was born in Croydon in 1935, under the traffic pattern of what was then London's principal airport. During World War II, when the bombing of London intensified, he was evacuated to the countryside, like thousands of other English children, and he recalls the Battle of Britain air combat raging in the skies over Sussex. At seventeen, he learned to fly in a Tiger Moth on a scholarship from the Royal Air Force. Since then, he has accumulated twelve hundred hours of pilot time in more than a hundred different types of aircraft, including many of The Great Planes. He was the runner-up in Britain's national aerobatics championship in 1964 and now lives in New York, where he is a contributing editor for Flying magazine.

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