Airship Technology: 10 (Cambridge Aerospace Series, Series Number 10)

Given its size I had hoped this would be an eminently practical manual, instead it is mostly theoretical with rather laborious notes on unlikely scenarios (solar powered airships for example, are obviously close to the author's heart, while commendable, the reality of a basic airship and its natural problems, as well as a more up to date and clear use of various materials in the actual construction of airships would have been more welcome).The much older and slimmer volume, Airship Aerodynamics: Technical Manual written around the time of WWII is actually more practical and one can tell it's based in factual experience rather than theoretical calculations by someone that has probably no experience of actually flying and using a real airship. That said, the book still has useful information in it, but I got the sense it was trying to a certain degree to make the subject more complex than it is in practice. One could after all write a manual about cars that takes into account the frictional coefficient of the road surface, but in practical terms this is not going to help much in the building of a car...

An excellent introduction to airships; as an aeronautical engineering graduate, I found this a useful 'conversion' text from aeroplanes to lighter-than-air craft. The breadth of the book is commendable, covering a practically useful range of topics from stability & control to performance, systems and even to air operations and meteorology. My one criticism would be that the chapters on recent developments, including 'hybrid' airships, while very welcome, are a little lacking in detail (perhaps unsurprising given commercial sensitivities).Overall, an excellent and well-rounded text.

very good