Travel For Aircraft Bookshelf – Wings Like Eagles: The Evolution of Military Aircraft from Wright to Warbird by John Thow

Wings Like Eagles: The Evolution of Military Aircraft from Wright to Warbird by John Thow, reviewed by Joe May, available on Amazon.

Author Mike Thow is more than an accomplished graphic designer, and this, in concert with his passion for aircraft, produced a visually stunning book. An unusual book. A spirally bound book. A binding design which Thow artfully uses to blend one page to its opposite number so the reader’s eye flows over the text and the imagery as effortlessly and enjoyably as floating along a spring-fed stream.

This book is certainly for readers who wish to learn the fundamental information on twenty-nine fighter aircraft types—each type significant in aviation’s development as well as history. This book is also welcome to readers who simply love aviation. Wings Like Eagles is amazingly full of formation flight close-up images of these aircraft, with nearly all taken by the author or his relatives. Cleverly using the spiral binding, Thow has many of these pages open into a double spread. Additionally, every page of this book is full-bleed, like the sky, vivid and wide with no borders.

Just over two dozen aircraft are included, and each is lovingly described with facts, descriptions, and images. The photography is superlative, and the artful renderings are emotive, to say the least, about this imagery. All but two of the aircraft are United States designs. This is an artifact of the aircraft available to Thow for in-flight formation photography, often from a B-25 photo ship. Fortunately for readers, he lives in an area rich in restored vintage aircraft, so the variety of fighters in Wings Like Eagles does not disappoint. Readers are sure to find favorite fighter types, though likely seen as never before. Readers are also sure to find aircraft types in a perspective not often seen, like being in a private hangar instead of a museum.

Incredibly, Thow and his relatives have produced an affordable, yet collectable-quality book, with high production values, lavish use of imagery as well as art, and double-wide formatting. Wings Like Eagles: The Evolution of Military Aircraft from Wright to Warbird is as properly placed on a living room coffee table as it is on a corporate executive’s desk.