The Hush-Kit Book of Warplanes - Book Review

Hush-Kit.net describes itself as the alternative aviation magazine and, if you're familiar with its content, that's a pretty fair summation. With tongue definitely in cheek, the website provides a mix of features, interviews and top ten pieces. Following on from a successful funding campaign via Unbound, the Hush-Kit Book of Warplanes distills the best of the website's content along with a bunch of new stuff to give you a coffee-table style book that will inform, educate and entertain - sounds catchy. Someone should maybe use that...

As with all Unbound publications that I have reviewed, the physical quality cannot be criticised. This is a hefty hardback in full colour and extends to over 220 pages. Edited by Joe Coles and with a foreword by noted aviation journalist Bill Sweetman, the reader is quickly dropped in at the deep end when it comes to the style of Husk-Kit's content.

Top ten lists are a long running genre on the likes of YouTube and it's something that works well for the Hush-Kit website. In the book, there are lists for top fighters of World War 1, the worst British aircraft (what a smorgasbord that is!), incredible cancelled military aircraft (excluding the QI-worthy TSR2, Avro Arrow and Northrop F20), and the like. Not that the editor restricts himself to top tens - there's 11 (count 'em!) top Jump Jets and 7 (because the number is lucky and so were these aircraft) overrated warplanes. 

It's not just lists though. Oh no! There are features too, like the history of the Bang Seat (that's an ejector seat, not the funny chair you keep seeing at your weird uncle's house - you know, the one with the fluffy wrist rests...), a brief history of fighter cockpits and a Freudian guide to spy planes (and you thought I was pushing it with the pervy uncle line... Tsk!)

The aircraft in question totally deserves its place in this list.

Interviews take up a large part of the book too, and not just the usual suspects (are there such usual suspects in aviation literature?). Pilots of such diverse aircraft as the Sukhoi SU-15 Flagon interceptor (a personal favourite of mine), F-117 Nighthawk and JA-37 Viggen vie with others who flew the Mirage 2000, SR-71 and a rather excellent pair of interviews with Iranian pilots who flew the F-4 Phantom and F-14 Tomcat in combat.

There is more, of course, but to find out, you'll have to buy the book. What really sells The Hush-Kit Book of Warplanes is not just the information but the humour. From a gentle sarcasm suitable for polite tea parties to all out mockery worthy of a pub night out, the full gamut of jocularity is on display. If you're a fan of a particular manufacturer (Blackburn cough) or an aircraft (Lightning, Scimitar, Vulcan, Lerwick... wait, hold on! Someone is a fan of the Saro Lerwick? Probably the same individual with that bang seat...), be prepared to have some fun poked at the expense of said companies/aircraft. The captions are also a joy to read. My particular favourite is on page 51 and, whilst I'll not spoil it here, it had both my good lady and I in stitches and I am never watching The Death of Stalin in the same way ever again...

I would say think of your own caption but the one in the book is perfect.

Naturally, being a book on aircraft, there are plenty of photographs and artwork - it is always nice to see aircraft that never made it into production represented in hypothetical service, and these compliment the text perfectly.

In the spirit of Roy Walker, "It's close, but its not right..."

As you can probably tell, I really like this book. Yes, some of it will be familiar to long time readers of the website but there is enough new content here to make this a worthy purchase anyway. If you're not familiar with the website but have an interest in military aviation, it's a simple statement - buy this book! To do so, you can either do it via the Hush-Kit shop (which will take you to the Unbound website) or via the usual online and high street book retailers. 

Finally, if you like this volume, there is a second one in the funding stage at Unbound here. When funds permit, I shall be adding my support to it like I did with this volume, as the first is an excellent advert for Hush-Kit Hot Shots Part Deux.