Wing Leader

Product Information

Red Kite are delighted to introduce a major new landmark series of books on the Battle of Britain. The Battle of Britain Combat Archive Series forms the most comprehensive account ever of The Few’s gallant efforts. Focusing solely on RAF Fighter Command’s clashes with the Luftwaffe, the series covers every combat that took place on every day of the Battle of Britain. Using contemporary accounts such as combat reports, rarely seen squadron intelligence summaries and the newly released casualty reports, the author and his team of experts have broken down each day into its individual combats and assembled the claims, losses and first-hand accounts into a highly accessible format. These combats are illustrated with specially designed maps showing the amount of aircraft involved, the area that the engagement took place and the location of where the casualties came to earth. Each combat and casualty report is illustrated with a photo of the pilot wherever possible. Red Kite are delighted to present a major new landmark series of books on the Battle of Britain. The Battle of Britain Combat Archive Series forms the most comprehensive account ever of The Few’s gallant efforts. Focusing solely on RAF Fighter Command’s clashes with the Luftwaffe, the series covers every combat that took place on every day of the Battle of Britain. Using contemporary accounts such as combat reports, rarely seen squadron intelligence summaries and the newly released casualty reports, the author and his team of experts have broken down each day into its individual combats and assembled the claims, losses and first-hand accounts into a highly accessible format. These combats are illustrated with specially designed maps showing the amount of aircraft involved, the area that the engagement took place and the location of where the casualties came to earth. Each combat and casualty report is illustrated with a photo of the pilot wherever possible.The series will run to around 18 Volumes. Volume One covers 10 July to 22 July 1940 and contains: After five years with SAM Publications he temporarily re-joined The Aviation Workshop, in April 2010, as Book Production Editor for their range of ‘On Target’ books, before joining forces with a local printer and starting the AIRfile range of camouflage and markings books.

With this latest volume, we welcome Neil Robinson to our team of authors. Neil will be well known to most of you, having spent most of his career working in aviation publishing, and we look forward to working with him on more titles in the future.Again it’s our absolute pleasure to introduce a new author to the series. A professional aircraft engineer and the son of a wartime Lancaster pilot, Peter Allam is a Lancaster expert in every sense of the word, and his in-depth knowledge was really needed with this one to pull out details on these lesser known examples.

Specially commissioned combat scenes by Piotr Forkasiewicz, one of the world’s leading digital aviation artists. After several years of writing articles for aviation enthusiast and aircraft modelling magazines, he was appointed editor of IPMS Magazine in the mid-1980s, after which in the early 1990s he self-published his own magazines, ‘Quarter Scale Modeller’ (for 1/48 scale aircraft modellers) and ‘Seventy Second Scale Modeller’ (for 1/72 scale aircraft modellers), for two years, until his first proper ‘commercial’ editing job in 1995, editing ‘Military ModelCraft’, covering figure, AFV and vehicle modelling, despite all his interest and knowledge being in aviation topics. Following our first volume on the Beaufighter which covered the early Mks and was predominantly about the night fighter versions, this volume covers the later wartime Mks and is mainly concerned therefore with the strike fighter versions.Ontario-based designer, illustrator, andwriter Terry Higgins is a native of Norris Arm, Newfoundland, who has had a lifelong fascination with all things aviation-history related. After the usual high school era Royal Canadian Air Cadets stint and subsequent interests in both gliding and powered flight, Terry realized that he was drawn more towards the technical and operational history aspects of aviation. This led, in a roundabout way,to careers in photo-processing technology and print/digital reprographics. Throughout, Terry kept up his childhood hobbies of model building and (mostly aviation related) illustration. The last volume (WPA 5) covered Mk I/III early production batches up to 1943 (L7527 to JB748), whereas this one covers Mk I/IIIs from 1943 to the end of the war (HK535 to SW279). We’ve avoided post-war Lancs and other Mks as they will appear in a future volume. Also set aside for a future volume is a more in-depth look into the interior of the Lancaster and the various equipment that was carried. As with all the books in this series, we’ve enhanced the photos to pull out the shadow detail and have added arrows and letters to identify points of interest. So, with this in mind, we set out to create a definitive guide to what the various serial batches would have looked like and what mods they would have had. This book, along with the previous WPA5, form an essential guide to the wartime Main Force Avro Lancaster, using high-res wartime photos to illustrate key features of each serial batch to guide modellers and historians in the future. With previously unpublished colour images of Village Inn and Monica III, this book is a must for any Lancaster enthusiast.