Miles Aircraft — The Early Years: The Story of F.G. Miles and His Aeroplanes, 1925–1939. (First Edition)

A$100 · Offered by Harry Hartog Rare Books · No longer available

First edition

AMOS, Peter. Miles Aircraft — The Early Years: The Story of F.G. Miles and His Aeroplanes, 1925–1939. Tonbridge, Kent: Air-Britain (Historians) Ltd, 2009. Quarto. Original pictorial hardcover. Matching pictorial dust jacket. 448 pp., illustrated throughout with hundreds of black-and-white photographs, construction numbers, registrations, and technical appendices. First edition. Now out of print. Frederick George Miles was one of the most gifted and underrated aircraft designers in British aviation history. Beginning in the mid-1920s with a converted Avro Baby and progressing through a succession of increasingly sophisticated light aircraft produced under the Phillips Powis name, Miles built a body of work that by 1939 encompassed some of the most elegant and capable aeroplanes in the world: the Hawk, the Falcon, the Whitney Straight, the Monarch, and above all the Magister — the RAF's standard ab initio trainer, which would teach thousands of wartime pilots to fly. His private-venture M.9 and M.9A trainer outperformed many contemporary European fighters, but Britain's pre-war procurement policies left it unordered. The story of Miles Aircraft in these years is simultaneously a story of extraordinary creative energy and of institutional failure to recognise it. Peter Amos's encyclopaedic account — thirty-one chapters surveying every design in sequence, supported by thirty-two appendices of construction numbers, registrations, and technical data, and illustrated throughout with

• Binding: Hardcover

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