Testing Time: A Study of Man and Machine in the Test Flying Era.

Octavo, blue cloth (hardcover), gilt letters, xi, 224 pp. Very Good+, with neat former-owner bookplate; in a Very Good+ dust jacket with lightly rubbed edges. From dust jacket: An authoritative writer on aviation provides in this book an important, carefully documented examination and re-interpretation of the role of British test pilots over the last fifty odd years, and looks forward into the future. Existing books have tended to concentrate on the specialist fliers (And, to their horror, glamorize them) or on the technicalities of their work; Testing Time is a study of the subject as a whole, in longer perspective, tracing the development of test-flying from Dunne's early experiments with a "stable flying machine" to the flight testing of the supersonic Lightning by Roland Beamont -- the sort of pilot who catches the 8.15 to work -- largely by means of devices such as auto-observers which foreshadow the fully automatic testing of the future. Aviation, British History, Aeronautics, Aircraft. bslic. …