The Imperial Russian Air Service
Book Title:The Imperial Russian Air ServiceAuthor:Alan Durkota, Thomas Darcey, Victor KulikovISBN:0-9637110-2-4Category:ReferenceFormat:HardbackSummary:This is another of the excellent "large tomes" produced by Flying Machines Press in the 90's. "The Imperial Russian Air Service; Famous Pilots and Aircraft of World War One" has 546 large format pages. The first forty are introduction. 94 pages cover seventeen Russian aces and a further38 pages cover six aces in foreign service. 76 pages cover additional Russian pilots, including a nice section on pioneer women pilots. 94 pages cover Russian aircraft designers and manufacturers, and 171 pages are devoted to appendices, victory tables, medals, scale drawings, colors, etc, including a large color section with markings. Grigorovich and Sikorsky companies are covered well, as well as Anatra, Dux, and Lebedev. In the drawings, Harry Woodman's fold-out drawings of the Il'ya Muromets planes are especially well-detailed.
As an example, the section on the Dux factory covers 14 pages and gives an overview of their extensive production of French designs (Nieuport, Farman, Voisin, Morane, SPAD) as well as a handful of indigenous designs, with a table at the end with numerical statistics on each design (where known).
Period photographs are sprinkled liberally throughout, and I assume that many of them are otherwise difficult to find.
If you are at all interested in pre-revolution Russian aviation, this book is a must-have. While it is out of print, occasional copies do show up on ebay and in aviation book stores.
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Originally Posted by Carl_Brisgamer
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