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Rating: 
Summary: Good Piece Of Work
Review: * Yefim Gordon's "YAK-25/26/27/28 -- YAKOVLEV'S TACTICAL TWINJETS"
provides a survey of one of the more obscure series of Soviet
aircraft, the twinjet Yakovlev "Flashlight" interceptor, its
high-altitude long-span "Mandrake" reconnaissance derivative, and the
next-generation supersonic "Brewer" bomber and "Firebar" interceptor.
This book provides a detailed reference on this seriesof aircraft,
describing the large number of subvariants, providing plenty
of black-and-white pictures, plus an end section of engineering drawings,
color plates, and color side-view paintings.There is much interesting information in this book, for example
describing how the high-altitude Mandrake actually started life as a
balloon interceptor. The US had taken to flying high-altitude
reconnaissance balloons over the Soviet Union and the Reds were
determined to put a stop to it, but as it turned out by the time the
Mandrake was flying the balloon flights had stopped, the Americans
finally deciding it caused far more trouble than it was worth. They
went to the high-altitude U-2 spyplane instead, and the Mandrake was
used as a "target" to help train air-defense personnel in techniques
to shoot down the U-2. However, as always with a Yefim Gordon book, I have to say that he
needs to do more to improve the user-friendliness of his writing. He
simply goes from point A to point B and fills up the space with ever
detail he can find. Maximum detail is fine, but it would also be nice
to have some introductory survey chapters, simple summary tables,
evolutionary charts, and so on so the readers can get a roadmap
instead of having to fit it all together while they go along. Still, I can't criticise him too much for this since it seems to be a
common mindset among technical writers, and he's done such a good job
of figuring out all the details. It would just be nice if he could
make them a bit easier to digest.
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