This is a fine book that contains detailed texts and profiles about air forces and aircrafts around the world during the early 1960s.

The world has long become used to the fact that virtually every country spends more and more from year to year on defence in general and on its air arm in particular, whether it be aligned with Eastern or Western bloc or neutral ; whether it be major power supporting large strategic and tactical air forces, or a small nation concerned primarily with internal security. There are now almost exactly a hundred national arms, in addition to which there are numerous naval air services and aviation branches of several armies. These, together, operate nearly four hundred different aircraft types ranging from supersonic strike fighters and strategic bombers to small liaison aircraft and light helicopters ; from the piston - engined survivors of the Second World War to the Highly sophisticated Mach 2.0 weapon systems now making their appearance in the squadrons of even some of the smaller air forces.

The MACDONALD WORLD AIR POWER GUIDE is intended as a simple and easily referable directory not only to this tremendous diversity of aircraft types currently in service and illustrated in the pages that follow by highly detailed drawings reproduced to a common scale, but to the whole spectrum of military aviation today. Notes are provided on the basic composition and equipment of each of the world’s air arms, the aircraft that they use are grouped in categories to simplify comparison, and the pertinent details of each type are listed in a serie of data tables.