Aéro-Cartoon Encyclopedia - Laurent Chassard

At the end of the Second World War, the United Kingdom had a considerable lead in aeronautics, supplemented by the results of German research conducted during the war. What followed was an initial period of far-reaching developments and major achievements, which have truly shaped today's aeronautical technology. Then, a series of political decisions led, earlier - and no doubt more forcefully - than elsewhere, to a highly pragmatic industrial and military approach. The latter has left its indelible mark on an aeronautical landscape where military aircraft are less and less British, while defense missions are increasingly shared with the private sector.

The aim of the Aéro-Cartoon encyclopedia is to provide anyone interested in airplanes and helicopters with the essentials they need to understand and put into perspective what they represent. In the simplest and most enjoyable way possible, using cartoons to characterize the features of each machine, it presents a list of the aircraft, the main engineers, the physical laws that imposed themselves on them, the technical solutions that were imagined, the prototypes that made it possible to explore them, the main test pilots and the events in which the production machines then met history.