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Air War Over The Falkands (sic) - May to June 1982


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Air War Over The Falkands

Book by AIRfile

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I was particularly pleased to receive this book for review as I served as a member of the Falklands Task Force in 1982 and saw a few of these aircraft types 'on the ground' so to speak.
Firstly, one cannot help but notice the mis-spelled title "Falkands"; an error during typesetting and openly admitted by the printers. This has subsequently been corrected in their reprint. Having now read the book I would like to use an age-old phrase "Don't judge the book by its cover"

The book's format is A4 portrait, softback, and consists of 73 actual pages of data and full colour illustrations. The work has been compiled by Neil Robertson and illustrations are by Peter Scott.
The information contained within have been extensively researched by a number of contributors including: Ricardo Caballero; Jan Forsgren; Nick Greenall; Tony O'Toole; Diego Rojas; Glen Sands and David L. Veres.

Content

There is a short preamble, with contents, followed by a two page introduction; giving a basic run down of the events which led to the fighting. This is followed by two main sections, each deals with the two countries aircraft and provides colours and markings at specific periods of the conflict.

British Aircraft

This section contains 38 pages of illustrations coupled with data of 92 British aircraft, including:
Fixed Wing - Harrier; Vulcan; Victor; Nimrod; Hercules and Phantom. Rotary Wing - Chinook; Wessex; Wasp; Scout; Lynx; Sea King and Gazelle.

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The illustrations are well presented in either of two formats: 4 different aircraft profile views per page, or 4 views of a specific aircraft to 1 page (except with larger aircraft such as Vulcans etc.). Each illustration has a few lines of text detailing the aircraft, its squadron and pilot and the particular time period in which the illustrated colour and details were referred to. This can be quite useful if wishing to build a kit during a specific period during the conflict; it is interesting to read how some aircraft had different colour schemes throughout the period from the start of the war until their return home.

Argentinian Aircraft

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Just like the British section of this book, the Argentinian element covers 92 specific aircraft represented over 37 pages. Aircraft types illustrated include:
Fixed Wing: Mirage; Dagger; Skyhawk; Pucara; Canberra; Hercules; Friendship; Super Etendard; Turbo Mentor; Aeromacchi MB-339; Tracker; Lear Jet; Neptune; F-86 Sabre; Skyvan and even a Boeing 707. Rotary Wing: Puma; Agusta A-109; Iroquois; Chinook; Sea King and Lynx.
There are so many different types of aircraft, serving Army; Navy and Air Forces, covered in this book and the colour demarcations shown mean that more than one of the same aircraft type could be built with different markings, camouflage or weapon loads etc.

Conclusion

This is a very nicely illustrated book, with sufficient textual information to help the modeller choose and paint some specific aircraft from the conflict. I believe the 4-view colour plans/profiles will be especially useful when deciding aircraft, squadron, markings and even weapon loads when building a kit. Having colour illustrations of 184 aircraft in one publication will, I suspect, make this a source document for modellers of aircraft during the Falklands/Malvinas conflict.
This book really does tick the boxes for me, from a modeller's view, however if there is one extra element that I would like to have seen, it would be identifying the FS or BS colour numbers for the various camouflage colours but I'm sure I will be able to get that from other sources.

This is the fourth in a series of well presented and visually pleasing books aimed, I believe, more for the modeller rather than historian. As such this is a fine publication which should become a valuable modelling source for a long time to come. I very much recommend this to anyone interested in building models of either British or Argentinian aircraft during the Falklands/Malvinas war.

Review sample courtesy of airfile-publications-logo.jpg


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Kindly mention Britmodeller.com to the supplier when making enquiries or orders

.

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