Mustang Illustrated

One of the more famous aviation aphorisms, attributed to aviation icon Bill Lear goes; “If it looks good, it will fly good”….that in reference to the first Lear Jet. If Lear was the first to make that dictum famous, he said it more than twenty years after the P-51 Mustang was designed, but it could certainly be applied to the P-51, which is generally acknowledged to be the best piston-powered fighter of World War II. The Mustang didn’t get to be the best just because it was good looking though, after all; “pretty is as pretty does”, and the Mustang did some pretty impressive work as a fighter, accounting for almost half of all enemy aircraft destroyed in the European Theater of the war. (More than any other fighter) It was built in greater numbers than any allied WWII fighter, save the Thunderbolt, but unlike the unlovely Jug, it has survived in greater numbers than any other WWII fighter. One of the reasons for that is the fact that the Mustang was still a potent fighter after the war….so much so that it got to fight in the Korean War, and served in a number of lesser conflicts with different air forces. When surplus WWII fighters were offered for sale to the public, it was the P-51 that fired the imagination of a whole new generation of private pilots. All those survivors make for a very colorful survey of civilian Mustangs and account for a significant number of pages in this “Illustrated” title. But the Mustang was first and foremost a combat airplane, and this Illustrated title is filled with the color of that combat career.The operational combat career of the Mustang section of the book contains (for the most part) only authentic period photos. The Warbird section of the book contains many authentic recreations of famous airplanes, but rarely applied to the original airframe. Since the Mustang was (and continues to be) such a competitive piston-engine racer, there is a large section devoted to those racing P-51s. There are over 399 photos, illustrations and line drawings in this Illustrated title. Read more