This is a nicely-presented book that tells an important story - how Britain won the Schneider Trophy outright in 1931 by winning an international race for aeronautical engineering supremacy (though not, at times, with the support of the British government). Though nowadays forgotten, at the time this was major news and millions flocked to see the world's greatest seaplanes racing in the Solent. Today, the Supermarine S.6B can be found in the Aviation Gallery at the top of London's Science Museum, still in the condition that it came ashore on 13th September 1931. Below it, sitting rather forlornly in a rather plain case, is the Schneider Trophy itself, ignored and forgotten by so many. This book tells the story behind the aeroplane and the trophy, and more besides.

And that's the problem. Unless you go into a lot of detail, the Schneider Trophy story only makes for a short book. So Jonathan Glancy has padded the book out. There is a history of air racing from the birth of powered flight up to the outbreak of the First World War. There is a history of the post-war decline of the flying boat and the transition to mass air travel through airliners, first with the DC-3 and the Constellation, and then with the arrival of the jet age. And there are potted biographies of almost anyone connected with competitive flying in the twentieth century. The narrative stops frequently to tell the stories of these people, often winding back the timeline and then letting it spring forward to tell the stories of their lives from beginning to end, irrespective of where in the historical record we encounter these people.

As a result, the actual narratives are badly disjointed and the reader keeps coming adrift in the timeline. You have to be quite interested in the subject matter to persevere. There are also a handful of factual errors, though these are not major. Almost as bad, there are not enough photographs. Many of the more obscure aircraft (at least to the British reader) are described but not shown. True, there are nice three-view line drawings of some of the aircraft mentioned in the text as graphics for each chapter heading, but these are only captioned in a list right at the end of the book; they lack impact; and their placement does not always reflect the point in the text where the specific aeroplane is described.

There's a good book in here somewhere. If all the biographies had been hived off to a separate section, then the main text could have flowed better and perhaps we could have had some more detail in both parts. Chapter Three, for example, opens with an exploration of Claude Dornier's S.4 design of 1924 and the reasons for Germany's non-participation in the Schneider Trophy races. This then morphs into the story of the re-invention of German aviation - but just as it begins to get interesting, the same chapter then switches to the USA and the reasons why it stopped participating in the Schneider races. Both stories could have usefully had more space devoted to them.

Overall, I would blame the editor. A more experienced editor would have been able to exercise more control over the text and impose some structure on it. As it is, what we have is a mess, which is a shame. This is a story of British achievement which deserves to be better known to today's generation. ( )